


Dismantle the Sun

by madcap_allie



Series: Inevitable Things [2]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Betrayal, Charles can be scary, Cougar!Moira, Death, Drinking, Erik needs to talk more, Hospitals, Hurt, M/M, Torture, Violence, it's all past tense except when it's not, sexy but disturbing dreams, sneaky!Mystique
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-09
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-07 08:40:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/429064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madcap_allie/pseuds/madcap_allie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post beach-divorce fix-it, presented as a sequel to Inevitable Things. Everyone was hurt in the events leading to the break-up on the beach, but Charles Xavier has always pushed forward, no matter the odds or personal cost. Now he's setting up his school and doing all he can to guide and protect the young mutants under his care, while privately struggling to come to terms with his injury and the loss of his lover and best friend. Alone in a world that has proven more hostile than he imagined, how can he keep his sense of hope?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Stars Are Not Wanted Now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delirium1995](https://archiveofourown.org/users/delirium1995/gifts).



> This fanfic is a much belated New Year's present for delirium1995, who pointed out that Charles' recovery in X-Men: First Class was far too quick and painless, both physically and emotionally. As James McAvoy has been quoted saying about Xavier, "he's just had a huge part of his physical life taken away from him, by someone he cares about more than anyone else." So he's going to a dark place in this one, with more hurt and less comfort. Sometimes life just sucks, and all you can do is pick up the pieces and keep going.
> 
> The title comes from W. H. Auden's lovely poem, "Funeral Blues".
> 
> I want to improve my writing, so please leave comments and constructive criticism, whether here or at madcap_allie on livejournal. Thanks!
> 
> NB: about the possessive apostrophe and proper nouns that end in s: according to Eats Shoots and Leaves, it is now correct to write **Charles's** ; but I grew up with **Charles'** , and it still just looks completely wrong to me to write it the other way. The Bedford Handbook (5th ed.) claims this is an acceptable exception; The 2011 edition of The Elements of Style is quite clear that it is not.

**~ Prologue ~**

Charles Xavier is standing in front of the bathroom mirror. 

He is wearing his favourite blue cardigan and an expression that looks wistful, but could be sad. He raises his hand to the glass, resting his fingertips against the reflection.

"I miss you," he says.

He moistens his lip with his tongue and sighs. "I want to go home," he whispers. It is not the sort of thing Charles Xavier would say, but he says it nonetheless, and leans his forehead against the glass in a gesture from a long-ago childhood.

The door to the hotel suite opens, breaking his reverie; he turns to the sound with a relieved smile. "Magneto!" Charles says, rushing to the door and throwing his arms around the surprised man's shoulders. "You're back!"

For a moment, Magneto is speechless. He bows his head to rest his lips against Charles' soft dark hair and takes a deep breath to steady himself.

"Mystique," he says, and Charles melts into his sister with a flicker of blue. The fact that she transforms first into the brown-eyed blonde she has so often been in public goes a long way to expressing what is going on in her head. _There's no need for a telepath to read your mind_ , he thinks, and doesn't think about the ache in his chest, how visceral it is after all these weeks.

 

  
**~ The Stars Are Not Wanted Now ~**   


November, 1962

"So here's the thing," Sean said as they walked under the trees, the first of the fallen leaves crunching under their feet. "Tomorrow's gonna be a big day. I could die. You could die."

Moira was torn between concern for this young man, the same sort of concern she would have had for any field agent about to go on their first ops and just beginning to realize that it truly was possible that not everyone would make it back, and an anticipation of just where this sudden turn in their conversation was leading. She had stopped in her tracks and so had he, and now they were standing together in the late afternoon light and dappled shadows. 

"So I was thinking, we should do it."

Moira couldn't help barking out a strangled laugh at the realization that it hadn’t just been in her head -- he really _was_ coming on to her. There were a thousand reasons why that was a bad idea. She was going to say so, but the way he was looking at her made her draw a complete blank -- 

"Oh Sean, when you're older," she heard herself say. Compelled, she stepped forward, placed her hand on his upper arm, felt the firm muscle there under her fingertips. "And just in case you're thinking of getting yourself killed tomorrow--" _What the hell am I doing?_ she wondered. She was leaning closer, her lips were on his--

_Her lips were on his and they were kissing._

She was kissing an 18 year old. Practically a boy. And it was quite, quite sweet.

She smiled at his look of delighted shock when she stepped back, away from the embrace. "Don't, because that would be a shame." _Oh Moira_ , she thought, _look at yourself, what are you getting yourself into?_

 _Absolutely nothing_ , Charles replied to the memory. He leaned back in his wheelchair away from her kiss, as bittersweet and meaningless as it had been, his fingers at his temple and her eyes glassed over and frozen for what would hopefully be the last time in her life.

He was ruthless in ripping out Moira's memories, not even bothering to replace them with false ones, just leaving her with a gaping hole where the past several weeks should have been. All of her memories of himself, he obliterated; all of her memories of Erik, he swept clean with the same sense of ownership. Her conversations with Raven all gone, and perhaps there was some unfairness there, because those he kept guiltily for himself, hoping that maybe he could use them to see where he'd gone wrong by his sister. But he left as much of that one with Sean as he could manage, taking away his name, but leaving the sunlight, the trees, the kiss. As much as Charles hated her now, he couldn't shake the feeling that this memory wasn't his to take.

His moral compass might be a little compromised at the moment, but he was still unwilling to blatantly disregard it, if only for his own sense of self-respect.

Alex opened the door of the mansion, hiding his unease at Moira's stiff posture. He held her suitcase in his hand. "Professor?" he asked uncertainly.

"Place it on the ground, please, Alex. Moira was just leaving." His lips quirked a faint smile, asking the automaton in Moira's skin "Weren't you, dear?"

Moira stood upright, turned robotically and picked up the suitcase, then walked down the drive to the government-issued car she'd driven there barely a week ago. Sean held the door open for her and said goodbye to those glassy eyes; Charles refused to feel anything at all, reasoning that honesty here was the best policy, and the truth of the matter was that Moira was simply _not there_ right now. Chalk it up to tough love. The car door closed with a resounding finality, and Charles guided Moira's hands to the steering wheel with a firm push. They all watched her drive away, even Hank McCoy from the windows of his lab; down the drive into the woods the car went, from the gravel drive to the pavement, and then finally to the main road and out of hearing. Only then did Sean turn and walk away from them, to be alone in the grounds behind the house. Alex turned to Charles and asked if he would like to go inside.

"Yes, Alex, thank you. I shall be keeping an eye on her until I can't anymore; if you would be so kind as to bring me some dinner later, I would appreciate it."

Moira turned on a narrow country road away heading away from New Salem, and Charles filled her with a sudden need to visit Buffalo, removing the few memories she'd managed to collect of pressing the brake pedal, looking for cars and finding the road empty, making the turn. When he brought his attention back to himself, he was sitting alone in the library. Alex came in with a tray bearing a sandwich and a cup of tea. "She's almost across the county line," Charles answered before the young man had managed to ask. "I'm removing her memory of signs and unique landmarks as much as I can, to make sure no one will be able to use her to come back and find us."

"Do you think they'll try?" Alex asked gruffly. His worry and his fear were written all across his face, but Charles didn't call him on it.

"It will be obvious very quickly that she knows nothing, she won't even have false leads to offer… I'm sure no one will try to force anything out of her." Charles hid a grimace, because he knew Alex and Hank and Sean still _cared_. He also cared, he truly did, but whenever he listened to the gaping silence in his mind where Erik was supposed to be, he always came back to _her fault, her fault, her fault_ , and Erik's voice brokenly, angrily, desperately saying _SHE DID THIS_.

She pulled a gun on Erik. Charles and he had been fighting, that was true -- with elbows and fists and words, all things that were fair to fight with when passions were high between equals and lives were on the line. He had wanted to stop Erik, yes; he was desperate to have Erik back in his mind instead of that awful emptiness that descended when he had put on Shaw's helmet. But he would never try to kill Erik, and she had. How could it have ended in anything but tragedy? Small comfort that the final reckoning was so small, just one man's loss, and not the lives of hundreds.

Charles reached out, wiped Moira's slate clean again; almost a hundred miles away, and he could still remove the memory of passing a local bus with the high school's name emblazoned on the side, of paying a toll. Since his time working with Cerebro, his range had improved; but the numb spot in his mind -- _Erik_ \-- was like a loose tooth that he kept worrying, and he wondered if he was constantly pushing himself in a misguided attempt to reach the one person who could fill it.

The tea was cold by the time he remembered it.

* * * * * *

"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

"Nah. You just picked that 'cuz you like the sound of your name." Alex was about to take another swig of his Coca-cola, then added nonchalantly, "Batman and Robin."

"Which one of them would be Robin?" Hank asked incredulously. "Really. I was thinking something more classical."

"You mean ‘Et Too Brutus’ and that other guy?" Sean asked.

Alex and Hank both winced, though probably not for the same reason. "No," Hank answered, "I was thinking more along the lines of Herakles and Iolaus. Or Acchilles and Petrocholes."

"Beast, you've gotta be kidding!" Alex gesticulated a little too much; Hank's sensitive ears heard each scattered drop of sticky sweet liquid hit the tiled floor. "You think the Professor's a queer?"

Sean was looking at Alex with the uncharacteristic seriousness he'd been showing a lot lately. "What makes you think that?" he asked quietly. 

"What kid doesn't read about Greek heroes and their 'special sidekicks'?" He turned back to Hank, "I _can_ read, you know. And you obviously read all the time, four-eyes, so we must be thinking of the same story, right?"

"Well, it's certainly true that--"

There was the sound of a thump and metal scraping a wall, followed by Charles' distinctive "dammit!" and a muttered "sheisse," and then he had wheeled himself to the door of the kitchen, shaking his hand where he'd obviously whacked it misjudging the corner again. 

"Ah, gentlemen, " he started, looking sheepishly at them, then wincing and sighing in exasperation. "I'd apologize for interrupting, but it's obvious from the _hotrods_ , _rainbows_ , and " he pointed to Hank, Sean, and finally Alex, raising his eyebrows “ _unicorns_ – really Alex? – that you are all shouting at me, that whatever it is you were discussing you'd rather I didn't ask about. So I won't." He started to reach for the wheels of the chair, then paused. "I will, however, ask if there's any of Mrs. Tydahl's pie left. The peach with blackberry?"

"Yeah," Alex leapt away from the counter he'd been leaning against and launched himself towards the fridge. "Let me get that for you, Prof."

"There's no need--" Charles started, but cut himself off. Hank had turned and already fetched a plate, and was now scrabbling -- literally -- for a fork, as he was still getting used to working with claws. Sean looked visibly pained that he didn't have something useful to do, and it was all so sweet and so sad at once, how desperate they were to do any little thing they could for him, their newly broken teacher.

* * * * * * *

December, 1962

It is early morning, civil twilight with a hint of warm orange marking the eastern horizon, and Charles Xavier is running on one of his favorite paths behind the mansion. His shoes have not yet gotten soaked; they pass easily through the light dusting of snow that has covered the hard frost from the previous night, leaving footprints of broken grass with a steady crunching accompanying the sound of his breaths, the rustle of his clothes as he swings his arms. This is how he knows he's dreaming, and explains why he is loath to wake when true morning breaks.

Everything works as it should when he dreams; his quadriceps get fatigued, his calves threaten to cramp from the cold, his toes hurt when he stubs them, they feel the cold that seeps from the ground and his feet slowly turn to blocks of ice. It's when they become numb that he turns around and heads back to the mansion, back to the others' dreams and his own broken life. When he is honest with himself, he is disappointed that the depression has followed him even here, that he thinks of himself in such terms; but he has been overwhelmed of late with the simple tasks of life -- getting out of bed, getting dressed, relieving himself -- that he must allow himself a certain amount of self-deception.

He rounds a bend, passing from the birches out to join the road that parallels the river's edge. The river and the wide open ground along it is not a feature of the Xavier estate; it is a half-remembered place his parents had vacationed when he was very little, and he could only recall this side of the river with any consistency. Tonight -- or this pre-dawn -- the other side was accessible by an old wooden bridge, partially covered, and beyond it appeared to be farmland shrouded in fog, the gray outlines of a barn and grain silo visible like ghosts.

“Mr. Xavier?" a young voice called out, distant but preternaturally clear, a trick of the fog and the cold. “Professor Charles Xavier?”

Charles slowed to a stop, looking around for the source of the voice. Silence suddenly, not even the sound of his own breathing, though his breaths formed white puffs in the cold air. There, just this side of the covered portion of the bridge, a young boy in jeans and an oversized plaid wool coat stood stock-still. Not a shiver, though he wore no hat or scarf or mittens, and Charles found himself shivering on his behalf. _Where is that child's mother?_ he wondered.

“Yes? Who are you?” he called back.

“John Turner,” the boy answered.

“Can I do something for you, John?” 

The boy looked down and shuffled his feet. Charles got an impression of faded freckles and a paleness that spoke of too much time spent indoors. “Um, can you come with me? I visit people when they're dreaming, and someone asked if I could invite you to mine, since I'm a neutral place. Like Switzerland?”

A sudden caw went up behind him, from the birches; a flock of tiny nuthatches, startled, took to the air with a rush of fluttering wings. When Charles looked again, the bridge was closer, his sleeping mind having already decided to venture forth, but with caution. Forewarned is forearmed, though at the moment he appeared to be armed only with his sweatclothes and his wits. It would have to suffice.

He stepped on the bridge and took the boy's proffered hand. John Turner smiled, and Charles gathered that the child -- perhaps eleven or twelve -- did not enjoy much human contact.

“You can't read my mind, Mr. Xavier, can you?” he asked, obviously anxious.

“No, John, I can't," he said, then corrected himself, "Well, not precisely. Wandering through someone's dream is much like reading the waking mind; but the sleeping mind is a much harder nut to crack, as it speaks in imagery, not in words _per se_. Even that is hard to read, because it is so personal. A bridge though -- that's obvious. The fog, hiding the rest...” the road they walked along was little more than two tracks pressed into the dirt, and it started to rise up a hill. “It's good to keep your privacy. Do you often invite others to visit?”

“No,” the boy answered. “Most people don't know they're dreaming, so they don't know I'm not just something they dreamed up. It's like they can't see the borders, so they can't cross them.”

“Can you hear what people are thinking when you're awake?” Charles asked gently. But the only reply was the sound of his own feet clomping on the hard-packed earth. John's steps made no sound, and Charles wondered at that.

“A lady told me you could, and she could, but not here; so she asked if I could find you and bring you here, and she told me your name and that you were in New York, and she showed me a map.”

Emma Frost. Appropriate, then, that Charles had been dreaming of running in the snow. He wondered how far away she was; he knew her range wasn't as good as his, and he would have felt her, surely, if she were in Westchester.

“Is it Miss Frost I'm to meet, then?" He had no interest in seeing her, although he often wondered what she thought of Charles having left her at the CIA when he'd gone through and removed all record of his and his students' involvement in the Shaw debacle. Then Erik had liberated her, in an apparent attempt to become the man who'd been the villain of his life, and Charles didn't know what to make of that, either.

“No,” the boy shook his head, his long bangs falling in his eyes. “She said she was just a ’lackey’, whatever that is.”

“She meant she works for someone else. Is it her boss, then?” Even dreaming, Charles' breath caught at that, and he focused on keeping his words even and light. _Oh Erik, what have you been up to?_

“I think so?” the boy said, unsure. And there, at the top of the hill, a figure stood wrapped in the fog and -- ridiculously, Charles thought -- a cape, like a Roman Centurion, the helm held loosely in his arms.

That's when Charles realized the numb spot in his mind wasn't numb at all, but filled with a soft, distant warmth. “Erik,” he said, his voice betraying his relief, even to his own ears. “Or is it Magneto, now?” he added, growing wary again as they drew near.

“Charles,” Erik replied without answering. At least he hadn't called him Professor X. “Thank you for coming.” A barely perceptible nod of the head, a slight inclination, but nothing of the warmth with which Erik used to look at him. It did nothing to relieve the tension mounting between Charles' shoulder blades, the grip tightening at the back of his neck.

John's hand slipped out of his, the boy shifting his weight to put himself as far away from them without actually moving his feet.

“It's alright, John, we're just going to talk for a bit about grown-up things. If you'd rather wait somewhere else...?” 

Wide eyes, green irises with pale green interior and dark rim -- a polymorphism in OCA2, associated with freckles and moles, a common mutation in the northern human population -- met his. “I gotta go. You don't need me to show you the way back, you'll just go when you wake up.”

“And if you wake up?”

John shrugged. He had already backed up to the edge of the hill, hovering on the edge.

"Will this place remain, even if you're not here?" Charles pressed on, wondering as he did whether it was possible for John to know what happened to his dreamscape when he was elsewhere; maybe it was a moot point and he was merely indulging in philosophy.

"It stays as long as someone's in it," John answered, matter-of-fact. He turned and took a step into nothing, disappearing much as Azazel did, and leaving the two of them apparently alone.

“Well.” Charles faced Erik, putting his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants for lack of anything better. “How is Raven?” he asked, the thought tumbling off his lips as fast as it came to mind. He'd very carefully _not_ thought of her for weeks now.

“Adjusting.”

Charles nodded and looked down, discomfited by Erik's unflinching gaze and terse replies. He tried not to lick his lips, tried to ignore whatever cruel force of attraction was tugging him forward. It felt as though he were straining backwards against a fast-flowing stream pulling him towards the rapids – or perhaps the open ocean, where he could drown. He looked up to meet Erik's gaze, bravely, and then he did feel like he was drowning. So much for hardening his heart against the man; Charles Xavier was soft, so very soft, as soft as melting snow.

“I had her things stored. If she ever wants them, I can have them sent wherever.” That won a blink from Erik. “Will you tell her that, please?” Another blink. Perhaps if Charles took a careful record, he could devise a codebook to translate the blinks into actual communication.

They stood in silence for a while, staring at each other and saying nothing. When it had just started to become unbearable, Erik abruptly crouched down, placing the helmet on the ground before standing up again. When Charles looked back down at Erik's feet (in those smart red boots, the sort of which Raven would be jealous), the helmet had disappeared.

“Thank you for trusting me,” Charles said, while another Charles Xavier, young and heartbroken, howled over the injustice of it -- wasn't it Erik who should be trying to win _his_ trust now? But the Charles who answered a summons of his own free will was calm and controlled and -- let us admit this -- concerned. Concerned for Raven, concerned for the handful of other mutants alone against the world which had not turned out to be as friendly as Charles had hoped it would, concerned for Erik, the "magnetic super weapon" which both superpowers and numerous smaller states with ambitions to the title were currently racing to find and control, or failing that, to find and destroy. His hand was up, reached out -- as quick as thought in this place, too late to undo the gesture -- and held against Erik's cheek, his thumb caressing the cheekbone, smearing the wetness there into a shimmer beneath the eye.

“Oh come here,” Charles muttered, the words escaping his lips as the concepts of _something he was brought here for_ and _something he was supposed to say_ faded quietly away. His hand slipped to the back of Erik's neck, tugging him down, and they were kissing like they had that last night; no, not quite. That night had been passion and fear of a different sort, whereas this was more like the nights they shared on their recruiting trip, once they'd gotten accustomed to each other, when they still had the future together to look forward to.

Erik didn't speak; he didn't have to speak, not because Charles was in his mind, feeling his words as soon as he thought them, but because Erik's body spoke for him. Desperation in the strength of his arms reaching behind Charles and holding him close, delight reflected in the quickening of breath, the relaxing of his shoulders as he found comfort in the familiarity of it all. For it was familiar, the way they fell together, the way Erik smoothed Charles' back and rested his hands in the hollow at the base of his hips, the way Charles gripped Erik's shoulders and arms, and ran his hands along the lithe musculature and sharp angles, curling his fingers to dig into the skin the way Erik so loved. The way Erik nuzzled Charles' jaw as soon as he broke the kiss for a breath of air, the moan that started deep in the back of his throat and ended in a breathy hiss when Erik licked the skin there and ended with a sharp nip, teeth to skin. When Erik had grown comfortable enough to take what he wanted, as opposed to just letting himself be taken, and Charles had felt proud of that, as well.

"You left--" Erik breathed against Charles' throat, breaking the spell, and Charles pushed him away and turned to face the bank of fog that swallowed the world beyond the curve of the hill.

" _You're_ the one who left," he said dully, suddenly numb, save for the twist in the pit of his stomach. Erik's hands found his arms, the calloused fingers pressing against his bare skin -- ah, the sweatshirt was gone, _quick as thought_ , and Erik's bare chest pressed against his back.

"Let me finish," he growled, but Charles heard the pleading underneath. "You left a gap in my life, Charles. I didn't understand, I never… no one…" He nuzzled the back of Charles' head, running his nose against his ear, his breath warm and his tongue so close, and then Charles was leaning back against him, because he really couldn't help it. His right hand drifted up over his shoulder to cup the base of Erik's skull, his thumb against the back of Erik's neck, holding him fast.

"You left a gap in me, too," Charles admitted, and then they stopped speaking altogether, sinking to their knees on the soft ground, the clover moist with dew. Erik's hands slid to his waist, his hips, and one hand slipped along the curve of his hip bone to curl around the base of his cock. Convenient, the sudden lack of clothes. And how easy it was for Charles to crane his neck so he could catch Erik's mouth in a kiss, hot and so hungry. 

It had been weeks without word, nothing but a hint in the news of Castro's mysterious new adviser, nothing but a whisper in the mind of a secretary at Moira's office who thought she saw a doppleganger, but decided it must have been deja vu. It had been weeks of loneliness since that last night, after weeks of spending almost every night together.

Charles almost forgot that he had to say the words out loud; and then it turned out that he didn't, that Erik knew what he meant when he shifted his hips _just so_ against Erik's stiff cock, aching for the fullness of him. 

"Do you promise--" Erik asked, his hand slipping up the shaft to rub the sensitive spot just under the head, a fond gesture if ever there was one, and Charles nodded, _of course_ , and he said it out loud, "Of course, love." 

And he wouldn't dwell on that.

Erik let go and leaned back just a bit to give them room, to realign themselves kneeling together on the ground, and Charles reached back to guide him into place. When he gasped – lust never quite overcame the initial discomfort, and Erik was bloody well _endowed_ – Erik reached a hand to his ankle, a warm comforting touch, a brief squeeze on the Achilles tendon. And then they were sliding together with a sigh, and Erik’s hands were on his hips again, running down his legs, slipping off from the sweat and then he was wrapping his arms around Charles in a tight embrace, pressing against Charles’ back and just rolling his hips in a persistent rhythm, keeping as much of their skin in contact as possible, as if he couldn’t hold him close enough.

Somewhere along the way they had leaned forward, and Charles braced himself on his arms, Erik still clinging to him so that Charles had to bear both their weight. It was oddly comforting, knowing that he could so, easily, and probably even in the waking world – or at least, he could if he weren’t being distracted. He curled his fingers into the mat of clover and the dirt underneath, torn between wanting to collapse on the earth and let Erik bring him slowly and gently to the edge and over, and wanting to break from his grasp and slam his ass against Erik to make him thrust hard and fast and as desperate as he felt. He was surprised when he felt Erik start to shake against him, and then rueful -- _this must be what it is like to have sex with someone when you can’t read their mind_ \-- and Erik was mumbling something with his face pressed against his neck. 

It might have been his name.

Erik’s hand was on his cock again, stroking, he himself being spent. “Erik,” Charles said, his voice thick and ragged, “Erik--” But whatever it was he meant to say, he couldn’t; he’d turned to face Erik, and his hands were on Erik’s chest, pressing him down to the ground, and they were kissing, open mouths and the taste of Erik -- copper and saltwater, a tang of leather from some forgotten memory, a bitter aftertaste on the back of the tongue -- claiming all his attention.

His hands were on Erik’s shoulders, trying to push him down, push him away to break the kiss; Erik’s palms were on the sides of his face, his long fingertips brushing his temples, his thumbs caressing his jaw, stroking the side of his neck, unwilling to let go. Finally Charles slipped his hands to the insides of Erik’s wrists and took hold of them, guiding them down to rest against the outside of his hips. Erik’s fingers curled obligingly into the skin there, and Charles couldn’t help but smile -- _I feel that_ \-- and -- _Oh how I’ve missed it_. The feeling swelled inside him, threatened to choke him, and looking at Erik like that, so relaxed and open, looking up at him with so much sheer happiness and trust, mistaking Charles’ expression for having missed him, not just having missed the ability to press his hips against a lover and feel that lovers’ hands gripping his ass tightly in response, and Charles felt as if he were being sliced in two; “You left a gap in my life,” Erik’s words echoed in his memory.

“Let’s fill that gap, then,” Charles muttered quietly. He nudged Erik’s legs apart, took himself in hand and pressed into Erik with no preamble. It was cruel to do that, and he expected Erik’s gaze to harden instead of soften, expected a snarl instead of a delighted gasp. But this was as much Erik’s dream as his own, and so Erik was as ready for Charles to thrust inside him as if Charles had taken his time to prepare him. Or perhaps it did hurt -- Charles jerked forward experimentally, the image of a battering ram springing to mind unbidden -- and Erik wanted to be hurt, deserved to be hurt, as much as... 

... Erik had tossed his head back, his throat arched gracefully, gasping, his arms flailed out to his side, his hands clenching into fists, and Charles’ self-disgust turned into momentary panic, until he felt one of Erik’s calves pressing firmly against his buttock. _Yes_ , that said. _More_. “Really?” Charles asked, a chuckle burbling up through all that confused emotional mess writhing inside him, and Erik gave him the briefest of incredulous looks before whacking his head against the ground again and clenching his leg and shoving himself against Charles. Charles reached forward to dig his fingernails into Erik’s pectoral muscles, grinning in spite of himself. Then he slid his hands down Erik’s sides -- the man was lithe as a greyhound -- and held his hips firmly as he proceeded to kindly fuck the living daylights out of him.

He did not cry Erik’s name when he came. 

It was only a whisper.

* * * * * *

3:30 am, the clock said. "Time to turn over," it meant, just as it had at 11:30 and 1:30, just as it would again at 5:30; the body must be shifted every two hours -- left, back, right, back -- or ulcers will develop and get infected, and then it's back to the hospital.

But this time, Charles felt -- well, sticky. He smiled in the dark, even though he was annoyed at needing to reach for the washcloth he kept by the bed, in case he spilled the glass of water he kept on the nightstand. _Well, this is new_ , he thought as he spilled the water onto the cloth on purpose, so he could scrub the tell-tale pool of ejaculate away. He tugged himself into position on his right side and wiped the hair from his eyes, the roots stiffened by his sweat. _But I'm not complaining._


	2. Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles' post-injury life is not so rosy, and despite his new-found method for communication with his old friend and the rigors of physical therapy, he still has too much time to dwell on the unhappier side of his circumstances.

**Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts**

They met every night that week. At first, they talked a little and fucked a lot, but by the end of the week they'd gotten used to their arrangement, and spent more of their time together walking and talking through what appeared to be the American Heartland, complete with amber waves of grain and a distinct lack of majestic purple mountains.

“And what have you got Raven doing?”

“Reconnaissance.” Erik didn't elaborate, and Charles tried to keep his concern at bay. Let the worry eat at him in private, no one else needed to know. “She's on a fact-finding mission,” Erik added with a ghost of a smile playing on his lips.

 _Which is to say she's on reconnaissance. You haven't given me any more information_ , Charles wanted to point out, but doing so would be tantamount to confessing how curious he was. And he did not want to give Erik the satisfaction.

But the longer he could keep him here in John Turner's world, the longer Erik kept the helmet off in the waking one, and the longer Charles could relish the sense of being _whole_ and _right_ in his mind. “Is Emma with her? She could help her keep her disguise when talking with people...” his voice trailed away, confused by Erik's strange look.

“Did you ever--?”

Charles shook his head. “No. I thought about it. I wouldn't experiment like that, though, not with her.”

“You underestimate her, you know.”

“Raven? Or Emma?”

Anyone else would have rolled their eyes; _Raven_ would have rolled her eyes and _harrumphed_ for good measure. Erik just gave him that level look, the one that usually accompanied the droll “ _This is beneath you_ ,” he'd think so pointedly in Charles' direction.

He missed that look. No one in the mansion would dare challenge him or call him out. Only Rebecca came close, but only in very specific circumstances, and even then, she let him get away with too much.

“Emma is a follower,” Erik said. “You know that. Why else would you have left her at the CIA, if you didn't suspect she lacked the initiative to escape on her own?”

Charles could feel his stomach knotting, his lips curling in distaste. “So you thought you’d help her out?”

That won him the look again. “It was Mystique's idea, once we'd discovered what you’d done. We could use a telepath.” Erik's voice had an edge of impatience to it, trying to find words for something he thought should be obvious, and wondering why Charles was being so obtuse, refusing to see it. Or at least, that's what he'd been thinking the last time his voice sounded that way. Now Erik tilted his head to one side, watching Charles. “As you just pointed out. Did you leave her for us on purpose?”

Charles looked away. He wanted to say no, of course he hadn't. But what if he had?

“And while we're on the subject, why did you do that to Moira? I was surprised she didn't remember me.”

Charles looked up, aghast. “Erik, you--” he stopped himself, because of course Erik didn't hurt anyone unless there was a reason for it, and Charles had been careful to make sure there was no reason. He took a deep breath and started again. “You didn't do anything to remind her, did you? I don't want to have to do that to her again.”

“Would you, if I had?”

“I would _have_ to, Erik. To protect--” _her_ , he meant to say, but the word died on his tongue. Erik's eyes flashed green in the bizarre light of the dream world. “Us.” Charles finished, his hand out and palm up, an obvious gesture.

Erik shrugged. “Well, I didn't. She just thinks I was selling magazines door-to-door. Another of Raven's suggestions.”

“Clever,” Charles said, his arm falling back to his side, deflated, but taking some comfort in the fact that Erik had reverted to her real name, at least.

Erik's lip quirked up. “She can be."

"So how did you hide the helmet you were wearing?"

Erik stilled. Charles sighed; he'd already said it before, it wouldn't hurt to say it again. "When you wear that _thing_ , it blocks you out completely. It feels like a numb spot in the back of my head, it's…" He quelled the impulse to look away, keeping his gaze firmly on Erik to impress upon him the truth and import of what he was saying. "I don't like parts of me being _gone_ that way. Even when you're too far away for me to know what you're thinking, even when you're out of reach, I can feel when you're not behind that shield." Now he looked away, at the rich brown earth beneath his feet; now he was confessing something too close for comfort. "You've been wearing it all the time, except when you want to meet with me in our sleep."

"Emma." Erik said after a while, as if it explained everything. And then, unexpectedly, "I'm sorry."

Charles looked up sharply, dread filling him at the word.

"I'll have to wear it for a while longer, and I won't see you, not for a while." They were apart now, six feet, twelve feet, standing on opposite sides of a bridge spanning a chasm between a field of young corn and a field of wheat. "Don't do anything rash," Erik warned.

"Don't make me," Charles warned back. 

He woke up before the alarm, rolled himself to his right side, and fell back into a fitful, unhappy slumber.

Days turned into weeks, and weeks spun colorlessly into months. The sun rose earlier and set later; the nights became shorter, and altogether darker. John Turner was nowhere to be found, and the spot in the back of his mind that was Erik stayed resolutely numb.

* * * * * * *  
April, 1963

Spring in Westchester was a miserable affair, April showers turning the whole world to mud. Charles seriously entertained the thought of an outdoor-only wheelchair and an indoor-only one; he could hardly berate the boys for leaving muddy footprints trailing past the foyer when he himself left two tell-tale tracks, narrow strips of wet dirt leading down the hall and turning with a wide smudge towards the library. The easy solution was to stay indoors, but that was also the boring solution that leaned too dangerously close to recluse, and as miserable as rolling himself through the muck might be (and really, it wasn't that bad on the fine gravel paths), Charles couldn't imagine life without his daily “restorative perambulation,” however little of an _ambulation_ it actually was.

So it was that he was wheeling himself through the damp spring morning, having survived yet another physical therapy session, casting about for Hank. The scientist-engineer had taken to running early in the morning, while it was still dark, after however many hours he spent in his lab -- now _there_ was a recluse, and Charles hoped he could prevail on Hank to return to a healthier schedule once he no longer had Charles's personal circus of physical therapists, occupational therapists, and private nurses to avoid -- but this morning he had been late to get started on his run, and Charles had been surprised to find his thoughts spiking sharply in his direction with “no, oh no, I'm trapped outside!” as Rebecca's car tires dug tiny ruts into the drive. _What was it with nurses and driving like madmen?_ , Charles had wondered back, thinking it along with Hank in an effort to lead his mind away from the miserable thoughts comparing his plight unfavorably with the old fairytale of the beauty and the beast. 

How dearly Charles would have liked to reassure Hank that he was not the beast in this particular instance. Rebecca was a bit of a beauty in the classically pretty way, with soft brown hair and hazel eyes and fingernails perpetually lacquered pink, but she could be an utter sadist with a flick of the wrist. She was very good at what she did, alternately cajoling and shaming him into allowing himself to be subjected to all manner of painful or awkward exercises that were getting better results under her guidance than his doctors had expected. But Charles knew all too well the enjoyment his winces and sharp intakes of breath elicited, which she carefully kept tucked away under her professional shell, often even from herself. As long as she kept it reigned in, she was using her own particular proclivity in a way that appeared to benefit society, and since Charles was immediately benefitting from it, he chose to keep her secret.

He'd been an accessory to far worse, after all; who was he to judge? And if he _were_ to judge, he had known crueler sadists, who did not consider themselves beholden to the rule of law or the mores of their fellow men. So he let her be, and he simply observed her cool assessment of how much she could push him, how much pain he could take without limiting how much he could take tomorrow, and he was dispassionately impressed at how unerring her judgment was. Still, he relished the sound of her car driving away, the view through her eyes of the main gate approaching, then vanishing in the rear view mirror.

Every day, his thoughts followed her until she was gone, in case she caught any additional glances of Sean or Alex or -- as was possible today -- Hank, so he could gently blur them into unremarkable, unmemorable, normal and nameless young men. And once she was gone, he had cast his mind around the mansion for Hank, and finding only Alex and Sean in the basement bunker playing with alternating their talents for maximum destructiveness, cast about the grounds further for Hank. Finally, there by the fishing shed near the pond -- and Hank was yelling “Fetch! I said fetch! No, not -- aw, are you a dog or a beaver? Okay fine, I'll get you a _bigger_ stick, you little stinker!”

“ _Hank? It's safe to come back._ ”

“Professor! Um.” Charles was already smiling. It was so obvious what Hank wanted to ask, it was almost unfair to make him go through with it. “I found a sweet dog stuck out here in the cold she-was-probably-abandoned-on-the-road-and” Hank was speaking aloud, as was his habit even when he knew Charles was actually hearing his thoughts, so that the sound of his words came like an odd echo. He took a gulp of air and finished in a rush, “IThinkWeShouldKeepHer!”

“ _She may be lost, not abandoned, Hank_ ,” Charles reminded him. “ _but at least bring her inside where it's warm, and perhaps we can figure out who she belongs to_.”

The sandy, short-haired, floppy-eared bundle of energy was an immediate hit at the mansion. She won their hearts the moment she burst into the entryway, playfully nipped at Alex's heels, tumbled over Sean's feet, and ran roughshod over Hank, evidently nonplussed by his profusion of blue fur. The only worrisome point was the amount of anxiety the chair induced; at first Charles thought she was growling at him when she saw it, but Hank recognized the behavior immediately, and started talking her through it. It was adorable -- if loud -- the way she planted her front paws wide and barked at the wheels (bigger than she) as if she could somehow make the chair itself cower. Then, having chastised the metal to her satisfaction, she ran up to Charles and slopped her giant warm, wet tongue over his outstretched hand.

“I _had_ meant to pet you, silly dog,” he said crossly, holding his still-wet hand loosely, fingers wide enough to avoid letting the saliva stick them together. If the dog could roll her eyes, she did; but then she went to him docilely and let him dry his hand off in her fur before she darted off to charge into Hank's knees again.

Hank named her Duchess.

The next morning with Rebecca was a disaster, for Duchess took an immediate dislike to the way Rebecca flicked her sharp pink nails against Charles’s bare skin, the way she tugged his legs out, efficiently and without apparent concern for his feelings.

“It's alright Duchess, it doesn't hurt. Really, it doesn't feel like anything,” Charles tried to assure her, but she only whined louder. In the end, he had to call Alex in to take Duchess out, and blur Rebecca's memories just a little; he bit back a retort to the nurse's unspoken remonstrance -- _that dog needs a firm hand, he's ruining it, that dog will end up the master of everyone in the household_ \-- and focused back on the task at hand, trying to talk to nerves that hadn't listened to him since October 28th, 1962.

Duchess stayed at Alex's heel when he saw Rebecca out, but she bared her teeth when only Rebecca was looking -- a special message just for her, _these teeth, your skin_ \-- that Charles saw only by virtue of piggybacking in Rebecca's mind on her way out. He was exhausted from the morning's session and not on top of his game; the best he could manage was to blank out the memory of the walk from the gym to the door, not bothering to smooth anything out or put a repeat of yesterday's exit in its place. The mind, Charles had discovered, was a resilient and practical thing; it often performed the same sleight-of-hand in selecting representative memories instead of recording each sundry detail of day-to-day life, making use of the fact that any morning's walk down the hall was much the same as any other.

If only spinal cords could heal themselves as quickly.

* * * * * * * *

“His back could be broken, or... or it could just be that the nerves are pinched... or his spine...,” Hank's voice was too close to panicking, and Charles was too much in shock to do anything about it. They talked over him, which was just as well; after he realized he couldn't feel his legs, once he'd said the fateful words out loud, it was the only thing he could observe. “I can't feel my legs,” he whispered to himself, and kept a tight lid on his thoughts and emotions. It would not do to share the horror and shock of it, the simple fear that he would never walk again, never race Hank around the mansion, the shaking left behind after the adrenalin had leaked from his system, its job done before it could begin -- his mind had come to a sudden halt on the memory of it, when his legs gave out under him and the ground flew up to catch him, hard.

And Erik, Erik in that _stupid, bloody helmet_ , his thoughts unknowable, tight-lipped, angry, and so protective.

“I called for extraction before... Before this...” Moira's voice caught, and gave. She gulped back a sob and tried again, “there's a first aid kit in my duffel, in the plane, I saw it by the cockpit, Sean, _please_ , please just go get it.”

Charles didn't want Erik's protection, had probably never wanted it.

“ _Tell_ me you packed a critical-care kit.” Hank was remembering his training, if not his manners.

“Standard-issue for hot-ops, Hank,” she answered, trying for soothing but unable to keep her annoyance from sharpening the edges. “Sean!” she all but screamed. “Where's that kit?!” All their nerves were frayed.

Except, perhaps, for Charles -- he reflected that his might actually be cut clean through. The realization was enough to pull his thoughts forcefully away from where they'd been dwelling; he could go back there, later, but for now, time _was_ of the essence. He said as much, and Moira and Hank both stilled to listen to him.

“Moira, what caliber is your gun?”

“40.” _God, I just dropped it back there. I threw it down, that's--_ , for a moment, chagrin drowned out her ability to think in words altogether -- _unconscionable, irresponsible, I'll never shoot again_.

Charles blocked her out, the mental equivalent of turning his back on her -- oh, how dearly he'd love to be able to turn his back on anyone right now -- and focused on Hank.

“The bulletproofing on our suits, Hank?” Charles wrapped his question in a soft blanket of _technical inquiry only_ and _not judging_ , because there was a litany of _should haves_ running through his mind, and it was interfering with his ability to think the problem through. Charles needed him thinking. “Quickly now, was it tested against a gun like hers?” A simple question as a kickstart.

“It should have been sufficient for any conventional handgun. I tested it against Walther PPK 9mil, Colt 45, and my dad's old .38 special.” his claws clicked out a nervous rhythm against the hard sleeve encasing Charles' arm. “But with Mr. Lehn--... It's possible he increased the bullets’ velocities when he deflected them. I don't know. If he got it up to the typical muzzle velocity from a rifle, if it was supersonic, then it should have -- it could have --”

“I don't think it was, Hank. He pulled the bullet free from my back, I'm sure I would have felt something if it had penetrated far.” Charles couldn't bring himself to say Erik's name out loud. If he did, surely they would know. “If you can,” he started, then paused for a breath, trying not to wince as Moira shifted underneath him; now was not the time to show pain. “feel the back of my uniform. Is it torn? Am I obviously bleeding? Moira, you must have had first aid training. It's required of all agents annually, yes?”

Moira laughed, sharp and high. “Well yes, but just enough to keep you alive until the ambulance shows up.”

“Then you had better go make sure the ambulance gets here.” She was stuck in place, terrified of moving lest it hurt Charles more, and didn’t even look up when Sean returned.

“I got your bag, Moira,” Sean said -- only Charles heard “ _I got your back, Moira_ ” -- and the interruption was a welcome relief. Alex took the duffel and unzipped it, immediately busy at work laying out its contents while Moira sat frozen. Charles directed Sean to probe his back. “Carefully!” Hank growled, and Sean snaked his hands past Moira's knees, just a light pressure, widely distributed against his upper back to his lower, where it disappeared. He drew his hands back, and Charles willed himself calm as he watched, cool and dispassionate, and Sean raised his hands, the fingers spread wide and _oh-thank-god_ clean.

“There's just a dent in the back of the suit, is all.”

The white noise in his head was the sound of several held breaths finally released.

“Spot of good news, then. But I could be bleeding underneath the suit, and I don’t like the idea of a dent still pressing against my spine.”

Hank spoke up, the gears finally catching and spinning the whole. “We should cut the suit off, but the material's pretty resistant to scissors and such. Which we don't have.”

“You've got claws, Beast," Alex pointed out, "can't you just tear the suit off?”

 _Ha!_ Charles squeaked a laugh, high and nervous like Moira's, and it echoed amongst them as he said “God no, I hope that's not necessary! Let's try the zipper first, shall we, hmmn?” He tried to move his left arm, but he could not convince his muscles that his arm was no longer needed to prop himself up against Moira's lap. “Moira, dear, the boys can help here. You’ve got to convince that ambulance to come, yes? And perhaps lying flat would be a good idea.”

He, Charles, was just full of good ideas lately, wasn't he? Why hadn’t he stayed down when Moira started shooting? Why had-- _Later!_ he told himself firmly. _Focus on the task at hand._

The task at hand was a muscle spasm forming in his lower back and radiating upward, but stopping invisibly around his tailbone, the pain like a light illuminating his nervous system, showing him what was responding and what was no longer on the map. It could be temporary. If his spinal cord wasn’t cut, it could be temporary.

Moira shifted out from underneath him, her hands under his shoulders to guide him down the few inches to the ground, and carefully resting his head on the sand. He bit the inside of his lip, hard, so he wouldn't cry out as the spasm finished twisting its way through him.

“Sean, there's a field manual in the kit, and it’s got a section on gunshot care and one on acute blunt trauma.” Moira said, finally getting to her feet. _Go, go!_ he willed her.

“Yeah, guys, I got it already.” Alex, of course; he would know his way around a field manual. “Good news is this kit is complete, so we got the steroid shot and everything.”

His arm freed from the need to fight gravity, Charles could finally grasp the zipper and yank it down. But he moved too quickly, and his back tightened and then spasmed again, and this time he did cry out, caught by surprise. When it was over, he wiped the memory from Hank, Sean, Alex and Moira -- it would not do to have them too cautious of him. The pain just meant he could still feel, and if he was lucky, he wouldn't hurt himself more. 

_Reasoning or rationalizing, professor?_ Erik's voice taunted him. He reached his arms to his torso, careful this time to isolate the movement, to keep his back relaxed on the ground. The inside of his lip was bleeding where he'd bit down too hard, and the taste of his own blood turned his stomach. The copper tang, _Erik_ , and fast on its heels, _left me_ and _took Raven_ and _I pushed them away_ and...

 _Focus, Professor_ Charles thought to himself in Erik's voice, and refused to consider what that signified. He tried something new, in desperation; considered his new numb spots, and copied the feeling.

“There,” he breathed out in relief, looking at the worried faces around him. “I had forgotten that trick of turning off pain receptors. Probably just the stress of the situation,” he said, tightening his lips and making the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkle. _See? A real smile, things aren't so bad._ He unclasped the buckles and pulled the zipper down to his waist.

“Now, I need your help to get my arm out of this,” Charles directed, his voice calm, the same he'd tried so hard to maintain while training them. It was easier, now. “I'm pretty sure the problem is my right side, so roll me like a log to my left.”

“But professor, it's important to know when it hurts, so nothing gets injured more--” 

“Not now, Hank," Charles shushed him, then added, "We need to know the extent of the injury, first" in a softer tone. Hank, still thinking, still _right_ , but still a step behind. Alex and Sean -- Sean's cool fingers surprisingly deft -- slipped his arm free and bared his shoulder, pushed him smoothly to his side and rolled the stiff material down.

“No blood, just one hell of a bruise,” Alex reported, and muttered _Jesus_ under his breath. “Okay, one shot coming up,” he added, and Charles watched Hank watching Alex, a fanged scowl forming on his face.

“How much are you giving him?” 

“Manual says a dose is 15 migs.”

“Give him two doses.”

“Beast, the manual says 15.”

“The manual's a year old,” Hank retorted.

“Alex!” Charles interrupted, before the sniping could develop into a full-fledged argument. “Hank's right, the full dose should be 30.” Hank's memory was nearly eidetic, and the medical journal he'd skimmed floated neatly to the surface of his thoughts for Charles to... read, in a sense. _More to think about later, Charles_ Erik's voice whispered. He felt the pressure of the needle going in, but nothing sharp.

Hank stiffened abruptly, and Charles reached in -- no time for niceities -- and heard through his ears the sound of an approaching chopper carried over the waves.

“Hank,” he said, “all of you, listen to me very carefully. We don't know what the situation is anymore, but we can be sure it won't be very friendly. So we're going to play this safe. As long as I stay conscious, I'll be able to make everyone on that chopper see you without recognizing you. You'll look like normal, human G-men -- yes Hank, even you -- and I'll be the only one they recognize. As soon as we land on American soil, I or Moira will get you a vehicle, and you should go straight to the mansion.”

“Shouldn't one of us stay with you?” Hank asked. Alex and Sean shared a long glance, and Charles felt a smile curling up at the corner of his lips unbidden. He could help them out, share their thoughts with each other, but preferred to let them keep their boundaries intact, as inconvenient as it may be. They were teaching themselves how to act like a team. Alex turned to look at Hank, nodded once, and swallowed, resolute.

“Me and Beast'll head up, clear the mansion out if we have to. Sean can be your nephew, or Moira can come up with something, but he should stay with you, and let us know if anything changes.” Barely a stutter over that last word, and Charles was grateful for that.

“Yes, I think that will work, Alex.” The sound of the helicopter’s rotors was plain to all of them now. Moira was directing the landing, marking it out with flares high up on the beach, _Good girl_. Charles breathed through his mouth, trying to will away the shakes that were somehow cutting through the numbness. He reached out to the pilot and co-pilot, and rewrote their view of the four of them huddled together on the sand. “Just a little longer, and we'll be home.”

He was lying, of course.

Hank and Alex had three long, worry-filled weeks alone in Westchester, eating their way through the pantry and trying not to drive each other insane, while Sean and Moira paced and fretted in the hospital they took Charles to. He'd managed to stay conscious until he felt Alex and Hank pull away in the vehicle Agent Levine had so kindly procured for them -- with only a tiny nudge on Charles' part, and a warm smile from Moira that had been just as persuasive -- and then the darkness came and got him.

He awoke to pain, he slept to pain. 

He came to, once, lying on his stomach on a cold metal table in the operating room; fascinated, he watched through one of the nurses' eyes as the surgeon laid his spine bare, revealing tiny fractures in the bones. 

"What the hell is going on?" the surgeon asked. He glared at the attending doctor, only five years younger than he, and ordered him to double check the X-rays.

"Right transverse process of L5 is impinging on the spinal column at--" the attending cut himself off when he looked back at the area of the incision. He looked at the X-ray, then swiped the clipboard out of the OR nurse's hands and flipped through the pages furiously. "These charts are messed up. This is--" he grabbed the nurse by the arm. "Look," he snarled at her, "this is somebody else's chart attached to the patient's! You're supposed to make sure things like this don't happen!"

"Shit," the surgeon swore. "Goddamnit, let's just get him sewn up, there's nothing here worth operating on." He looked up at Charles' nurse. "Julie, hand me the number 20 needle. And get some more light over here."

Julie's hand drifted automatically to a steel tray full of implements; but when Charles balked at the idea of a needle and thread so close to his fragile spine, her hand fell roughly and the entire thing went clattering to the floor. He jumped in surprise; only it was his own body on the table that jerked and the entire room erupted in curses and shouts. Someone panicked and hit him with another dose of anesthesia, and the world grew very, very cold and the darkness claimed him again.

He found out later that he'd flatlined. 

They were careful with the second surgery, necessary to make up for the damage sustained as a result of the first. So was he; as soon as he felt himself going under, he shoved away from his body, a trick he'd learned to deal with his stepfather's mindless cruelty. Only this time, he wouldn't be able to get back into his own skin until the numbness had faded. It was dangerous, projecting himself like this, but the alternative was no better. So he let his attention drift down the hall, to Moira sitting in the waiting room with the October issue of U.S. News and World Report open on her lap, flipping the pages without reading, her eyes dry but unable to focus on the words. He skimmed her thoughts -- Sean safe back in the hotel room, she'd arranged it so she was standing watch whenever something particularly bad might happen, and the butt of her pistol jutting into her hip was a sharp reminder that she was ready this time -- but he was careful not to alert her to his presence. _Like a ghost_ , he thought to himself, _Or, practicing for ghosthood_.

He was already familiar with death.

\------------------

“One,” Erik's flat voice said.

The coin drifted closer, inexorably, a promise of the end, inevitable. Shaw's attention was riveted on the coin he now recognized, pride and fear and a fierce hunger for something radiating from his twisted mind, but Charles could only see Erik's face, could only watch as the light in his eyes faded. “ _If you actually **loved** him_ ,” the terrible, brilliant part of Shaw whispered, and Charles could feel the derisive laughter accompanying that little word even as the voice continued in its cool, seductive way, “ _you would let me go, and I would spare him. Spare you both._ ”

“Two.”

“ _You make such a lovely team, Charles. It would be such a shame to waste that. And you've been making such progress on the foundation I built. Such control he has now -- thanks to you._ " Charles felt the sense of pride swell, and he knew that Shaw was right; and worse, that the fear and desperation and, yes, the pride was just as much Charles' as Shaw's, and he couldn't distinguish which was his. " _He's beautiful like this, isn't he?_ ” Shaw mused, like an artist standing frozen before a tidal wave, entranced by the effect of the light on the water.

“Three.”

The coin was nearly out of view, and Charles got one last clear image of Erik's face before he screwed his eyes shut -- his own eyes, not Shaw's, he wouldn't let the bastard hide from his own death -- and Shaw spoke in his mind, “ _Last chance, Charles._ ”

“ _Die, you fucking monster_ ,” Charles told Shaw viciously, and he knew it was the moment of truth, and he knew he meant it. He still screamed as the coin dug into the skin, pushing its way past the skull, as the snapping of bone being split asunder echoed sickeningly through their joined minds. He couldn't help but scream, because he had to stay, because the amount of energy required to push such a poor projectile forward was energy that Shaw could use if Charles wasn't fighting so hard to keep Shaw's mutant ability at bay. 

Erik's face and the entire world in front of Shaw went flat -- perspective belonging to the front portion of the visual cortex, where the coin was still grinding forward. Only a little further, and Charles could let go. The world contracted, the color drained away, and there was only a dark tunnel with Erik illuminated at the receding end, and then, suddenly, it was over.

Charles's ragged scream tattered and fell into the silence. He couldn't remember falling to his knees; he didn't remember pushing Moira away. But he would not forget staggering to his feet with a sob and a gasp for air, and plunging out of the broken plane into the too-bright world of the sandy beach with one thought before him: _Erik._

What, if anything, was left of the man he knew?

\-------------

For a long time after, he shoved the memory of that day behind him, determined to move forward and convinced that there was nothing to be learned from revisiting it in his mind. But it kept slipping back at odd moments, the sound of an engine recalling the whine of the Blackbird's engines when Hank pulled it into that tight roll, or a flash of light reflecting off the fountain in the yard behind the mansion yanking him back to the moment he stepped out of the broken plane into the light, driven forward by a desperate need to see Erik, to touch him with his mind, to replace the little numb spot in the back of his head with the knowledge that Erik was safe, was still there, was still _his_. 

He hadn't been aware of it then, though; he hadn't consciously recognized the emptiness until the day after the second surgery, three days after the Bullet. The attending doctor from the surgery, Dr. Philip Chandela, brusque and businesslike, had entered the room and stepped immediately to Charles' side, pulling back the covers and flipping aside the hospital gown. "We'll keep this quick, Mr. Xavier, and you can go back to rest," he said, the words flowing swiftly and meaning nothing, the doctor barely aware of saying them. "Fluids and rest is what you need right now, let your body heal at its own rate, and hopefully once the swelling is down, we'll be able to see things go back to normal." 

The doctor's hands were cold and clammy where they brushed against his waist, and Charles -- on his left side, facing away from the doctor, scowled to himself at the thoughts underneath Chandela's words. _Already three days and no response_ , the doctor thought, and Charles picked up the sense of a line entitled "full recovery" falling exponentially, with tick marks denoting days-since-injury. The doctor would not apologize for the botched surgery, the one that should not have even happened in the first place; someone had gotten into the patient files and manipulated the charts, had done so inexpertly, evidently in a rush, probably taking advantage of a surprise opportunity, a door left ajar, a receptionist who had stepped outside for a quick cigarette. The details did not matter. They were a government hospital, and mistakes were not acceptable; and yet, sometimes men in black suits whose employers were denoted only by initials, when they learned of such mistakes, nodded without surprise and even, perhaps, with relief. There was a fine line that Chandela couldn't see, but knew existed, and he wasn't sure on which side of it Charles fell.

"This is just a diagnostic test to determine the state of your autonomic reflexes. Let me know if you feel pressure or discomfort," Chandela said, and Charles watched with raised eyebrows as the doctor's fingers reached over and took his helmet, the _glans penis_ , between his fingers. He couldn't feel it, not exactly; but he saw through the other man's eyes as he slipped a finger into his rectum to feel the sphincter muscle.

And he remembered guiding Erik through it, the first time the man had agreed to penetrate him, the first time he'd explored anyone in that fashion. He had been in Erik's mind, guiding but not controlling, and Erik was in him, a tight loop. Erik's happiness glowed in a bright spot in the back of his head. 

The doctor's fingers squeezed, and he felt the curious sensation of tightening, a brief moment of penetration. "Ah...," he was about to say, _I felt that_ , but on second thought, he changed it to _I think I felt that, but maybe I just felt **you** feeling that_ , and realized that he'd be better off just keeping his own counsel for now. It was surreal to watch his penis stiffen just a little bit, and not be able to feel it do so.

"That's a good sign," Chandela said, letting go, flipping the material of Charles' thin gown back into place and replacing the covers. He washed his hands at the sink in the corner. "The smooth muscle is responding to manipulation now, which indicates that you're healing, and will likely have complete bowel function, or close to it." He paused, thinking of Charles' aborted attempt at saying something and remembering a comment in yesterday's rounds about being sensitive to the invasiveness of patient examinations. "It's a perfectly natural response of the body," he added. "Clinical research shows all healthy heterosexual men respond to such stimulation. It doesn't indicate anything abnormal." The doctor made a final note on the chart and returned the clipboard to the foot of the bed. "Plenty of fluids, plenty of rest," he said as he walked out the door, leaving Charles stunned, torn between being hopeful of a full recovery, and utterly hopeless, finally aware of what it was Erik had become to him.

\--------------  
Mid-April, 1963.

"I get the revenge thing. I do," Alex muttered, staring at his interlaced fingers on the table, "it doesn't make him that bad of a person."

"People who kill for revenge go to jail." Hank was doing his level best to lay out his argument calmly and simply, but it came out as somehow _belligerently calm_ , instead.

"So he can do some time. Christ, Beast! It still doesn't make him a bad person."

"Maybe he's just misunderstood." Sean was lounging at the table across from Alex, making sure their legs didn't actually touch. Alex looked like he'd explode at the slightest provocation, and Hank was standing safely three feet away, hovering over the percolator. "You know, like Bizarro."

"Unable to tell the difference between right and wrong? It's a compelling analogy, but it falls apart pretty quickly. He knows the difference between right and wrong, but he's more concerned with the means to an end. That lets him justify things like… terrifying a senator and his family to get him to abstain from voting on Stryker's bill. Or kidnapping, which is technically what he did." The newspaper was lying on table before them open to the article in question; the Professor had already marked it in red for saving later, after everyone had a chance to read the paper but before it was crumpled up and turned into kindling for the fireplace in the library.

"But it was _just_ kidnapping." Alex leaned back and pushed his plate aside, not caring when Duchess nosed up to the edge of the table to steal a piece. "And look at the bill, Hank! If that thing passes, the Tydahls wouldn't just be commended for kidnapping you and handing you over to the government, they'd be questioned if they _didn't_."

"Yeah, that's not cool," Sean said. He picked a piece of bacon off Alex's plate and held it down for Duchess to take from his hand. Hank was about to point out that the bill probably wasn't constitutional and wouldn't hold up under scrutiny, but Sean cut him off with, "You shouldn't let dogs eat off the table. But back to Bizarro, the point was that he wanted to do things right, he just didn't know how. And he was doing pretty good until he lost his girlfriend, right?"

"Everybody knows most villains are either villains because they get disfigured somehow," Alex answered, partly because he didn't want to hear Beast lecture on comics the way he lectured on everything these days, "or they lose their true love in some terrible accident, and it's usually their fault. I swear to God, comics are so predictable."

Sean and Hank stared at one another in stunned silence. Even Duchess sat and stared at Alex with her head cocked and one ear raised, although she might have just been begging for another savory taste of bacon.

"Okay, I said it." Alex looked up Hank and let his shoulders slump, admitting defeat. "I get it, now, what you were saying before about them. Thing is, what can we _do_ about it?"

Sean nodded and leaned back, the epitome of cool in the face of adversity. "Easy. We've just got to get them talking somehow."

\---------------

It looked like morning, and it was, technically. Charles had seen 1:30 come and go, rolled over dutifully, and fell asleep slowly. He had been dreaming of John Turner's stylized midwestern landscapes almost every night for a month without actually being in them, so when the boy greeted him and walked him across the bridge, Charles almost forgot the reason why he'd been so anxious to be there. But before he could ask John where he had been for the past several months, the boy was already gone. 

Erik walked by his side, the cape swaying gently with his steps, the edges flipped occasionally by the light spring breeze. "A dog, Charles?" he asked, amused. "Whatever for?"

"The boys like her."

Erik snorted.

"No, really. It's good for them, having something to care for besides themselves. And they like the way she looks after me."

"You make it sound like you're an invalid."

"I'm not!" Charles replied, hotly. Erik frowned, his brows creasing together. "I'm just... It's worrisome, what's happening in the political sphere these days. Hank is keeping an eye on some proposed legislation worming its way through the House committees that has Stryker's mark all over it--"

"We're watching that, too." Erik said darkly.

"Yes, I saw that in the papers. Which means other people will have noticed it, too." Charles kicked at a rock lying on the dirt road in front of him. He didn't want to think of obstacles just yet, so he moved the conversation to easier territory. "And we're preparing for the first children -- actual children -- to arrive in a few months. There's a thirteen year-old with an affinity for atmospheric events. I would say she can control the weather, but at that age you can imagine how much control she actually has. And an eleven year-old boy who is essentially a living laser, Hank is already tearing his fur out over prosthetics to control it that won't interfere with the boy's development or ability to interact with his peers."

"That sort of gift would be put to good use in the Brotherhood."

Charles scowled at the thought. "An adult can choose to be on the front lines, Erik. A child needs his childhood, in order to become an adult who can make that decision."

"Did we have childhoods, Charles?" Erik stopped, and the breeze settled with him. 

Charles met his gaze and sighed. "No," he said quietly. "But maybe we wouldn't have made so many mistakes if we had." 

John Turner's dreamworld spread out around them, an idealized version of spring with soft green rolling hills under a clear blue sky, a lone hawk white as snow circling high overhead and casting its shadow on the fields below.

"What mistakes are you thinking of?"

"God, where to start?" It struck Charles as both horrible and funny at the same time, looking back at everything they'd done and wondering what _hadn't_ been a mistake. "With the worst? Or just the first?" he added with a bitter laugh. He shook his head, the whole of their history flashing before his mind's eye, trying to settle on one point. 

Erik watched him, tight-lipped. "This isn't like you, Charles--" he started, but Charles cut him off angrily.

"What?” He rounded on Erik, the pressure building in the back of his head as he stared at that impassive expression, anger building on itself like a thundercloud, seemingly out of nowhere. "What, precisely, isn't like me?" 

Something flickered in Erik's eyes, and Charles dove after it like a terrier. "We talk about how best to deal with the problems facing us, and then you go off and do the exact opposite," he yelled, his voice rising in pitch with the volume until he was nearly screaming. “Is that why you had this arrangement set up? So I can be an... an _oracle_ to prompt for answers, so you can ignore them later? And always here for you, no matter what you do?" With the speed of thought, as all things in dreams, he flashed from standing still before Erik in one moment to lunging at him with arms outstretched in the next, shoving him back towards the hill's edge. No time for second-guessing.

Charles blinked awake at 3:42 with a start, the sheets tangled around his arms and bunched up in his fists. It took him twenty long minutes to free his upper body enough to discover that his legs had remained in exactly the same position he'd left them in, and his hope -- the hope he woke with every two hours during the night -- was dashed all to pieces, the same way it always was. The bedsheets thrown aside and his legs lying helpless and inert, his frustration spun into a sudden fury and his hands were fists, pounding down on the tops of his useless legs, once, twice. Nothing, just the feel of unresponsive flesh under his hands, the tension in his upper back responding to the changing pressure on the mattress, and he knew from experience there would be no bruises. The fury was gone as suddenly as it had come, leaving cold detachment in its wake.

What came next made perfect sense to him, then, though it might not have by the light of day. Pressure was one sensation, sharp another. If one could not be felt, perhaps the other could; and he had the perfect tool tucked in the drawer of his bureau, where he put it the night Erik placed it in his safekeeping. Then it had been a promise that Erik would not use it anymore, that he did not need it. Now it was a hope.

Charles rolled himself out of bed, shifted himself to the chair and wheeled over to the window, drawing the curtains wide. The light of the nearly-full moon, _waxing gibbous_ , streamed in, gently illuminating the edges of things and throwing the rest into shadow. Then he moved to the dresser, pulled the drawer open and pushed aside the handkerchiefs and ties to reveal the dagger. He held it up, the cool light catching the gothic script etched into the blade, _Blut und Ehre_. He touched the tip with his finger -- still perfectly sharp, made so by Erik's power.

He would make it clean and neat; a single poke of the tip, for increasing pressure, just until it had broken the skin -- that would be the sharp that he could observe visually, if he could not feel it. Then he would tilt the blade forward and make a single cut with the edge, not too deep, ideally not deep enough to draw blood, and just long enough to give his nerves a chance to register the sensation. He reached out quickly, quietly scanning the minds around him, Alex and Sean deep in sleep in their rooms, Mr. and Mrs. Tydahl sleeping lightly in the groundskeeper's cottage, Hank... Hank running in the woods. _Better to leave the lights off_ , Charles thought, and did not pursue the reasoning any further than that. He angled the chair to make the best use of the natural light and shimmied the pants of his pajamas down to his knees, a little production all on its own.

He performed the experiment carefully, just as he had thought it out; tip, just to the breaking of the skin, tilt, and slide the edge. Did he feel it there, just a spark? If so, it was fleeting, too quick to be sure; and _idiot_ , he thought, _the act of watching spoils the test, it's too easy to **imagine** feeling something_. He frowned, wiped the blade once against a handkerchief, leaving behind a small dark line on the cloth, and started again. This time he watched the point of the blade depress the skin until a small dark pool welled around it, watched as he tilted it forward carefully and aligned it parallel to the faint track of the previous experiment, biting the inside of his lip in concentration. Then he looked up at the moon and listened as hard as he could to his right leg as he dragged the knife forward.

Nothing.

It was the inverse of his experience in Erik's old nightmares; the knife moved of _his_ accord, not its own, and he felt _nothing_ , whereas in the dreams he had felt nothing but the pain.

“Hell!” he yelped when he looked at his handiwork. The blood was welling into the incision and pooling at the initial puncture site. He grabbed he handkerchief hastily and pressed it against the cut, swearing at himself. This would not do. It would not do at all. 

He wiped the blade off hurriedly as he heard the front door swing shut, followed by the creaking of the floorboards in the foyer under Hank's weight. He held his breath as he grabbed a handful of cloth from the drawer and shoved the wad against the wound. He couldn't feel the pressure, but it would work anyway to stop the bleeding.

Hank was coming up the stairs, breathing heavily as he reached the top; a scrabble of claws on the hallway floor coming from the far end where the boys' rooms were, tapping out an erratic little dance in the space between the old Persian runner and the bare hardwood at the edges was undoubtedly Duchess, probably winding herself around Hank's legs. Not for the first time Charles wished he could control animals as well as people.

"Hush, hush," Hank's voice carried. " _Quiet_ , Duchess, you'll wake--" 

Charles heard him stop mid-course and felt him listen. Holding his breath didn't matter at this point, although he did it anyway; his arms were shaking with the effort of keeping the pressure steady, and the damn chair gave him away with tiny metallic creaks. Hank's hearing was so damn sensitive these days, even with all the fur in his ears.

Hank drew near, outside his door. "Professor?" he inquired.

“ _Good morning, Hank. Or good night?_ ” Charles thought to him, not trusting his voice.

"Either," Hank said on the other side of the door. Duchess whined and scratched at the wood. "Is everything alright?"

" _Fine, Hank. I was just enjoying some time alone to think._ " Hank would understand that, would respect that. The dog was another matter. Whatever she was doing, it was worrying Hank.

"I think Duchess wants in, Professor. Should I take her--?"

" _YES, Hank, take her outside. Don't let her wake the others._ " Charles was beginning to panic, and his thoughts had picked up a brusque edge. It was more forceful than he intended, but he must not, he _must not_ let Hank see what he'd done in a moment of weakness. He couldn't deny it any more, that he wasn't handling this well; _This isn't like you, Charles_ , Erik's memory whispered, and he had been right, of course. Erik was always good at cutting through things to the heart of the matter.

Charles needed help, but not from his charges.

" _Thank you_ ," he added, giving Hank an extra mental nudge. He strained to listen over the sound of the blood rushing in his ears, pounding out the rhythm of his heartbeats. Duchess yelped when Hank picked her up, and then whined as Hank held her jaw shut, going back downstairs with the dog cradled against his chest. The front door opened and closed, and Charles sagged in his chair, relief and embarrassment making his head swim.

The moon was falling quickly towards the dark line of trees on the horizon when Charles finally got himself back into bed, satisfied that the bleeding had stopped. He wrapped the evidence in yesterday's paper and placed it in the trash, hoping Mrs. Tydahl wouldn't take note of it during her morning rounds.

And if she did, he would just take the memory away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is based on a quote by Kurt Vonnegut about the afterlife. 
> 
> There is an anonymous 1stclass-kink fill entitled "i could never understand your tears," which was too noncon for me to be comfortable with, but really made me think about the nature of telepaths and that dang helmet. The notion of Charles being lost without his connection to Erik is not new; I stand on the shoulders of fanfic giants, or I am in their sandbox playing with their toys, but it's a _good idea_ and I've enjoyed working with it.
> 
> Thanks also to delirium1995, for sending me journal articles about diagnosis and treatment of partial spinal cord injuries, and for lively discussions of the medical establishment's attitudes towards patient communication, empathy, and attitudes towards homosexuality. My own reading on the subject and talking with friends in nursing suggests that the portrayal of aggressive and abusive treatment of nurses is not far from the mark.


	3. Stop All the Clocks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles discovers that the machinations of the outside world didn't stop just because he needed time off to recover.

* * *

"Beast, what happened to you?" Alex asked, pausing for a moment with a towering forkful of pancakes mid-shovel to his mouth.

Hank's eyes narrowed, following Alex's gaze to the bright white bandage tied around his shaved forearm. "Duchess bit me."

"Well, what did you do?" When there was no answer, Alex peered at him harder. "Hank, what did you do with Duchess?" he asked in a low voice.

"Nothing! She bit me and ran off--" he cut off abruptly when he realized Charles was in the doorway, aligning his wheelchair to slip through the narrow gap.

"Ah, Hank. I wanted to talk with you about the progress you've made indexing the Cerebro results." Charles said brightly. "There's a boy by the name of John Turner, maybe 11 or 12 years old, somewhere in the Midwest… what happened to your arm?"

An exasperated growl rumbled through Hank's chest, and he ran his hands over his face and the top of his head, tugging at the fur there. "Duchess bit me! Last night, she was so upset, I took her out for a walk and she bit me and ran off, _Jesus!_ " Hank's yellow eyes turned into wide round saucers. He squeaked out a quick "Sorry, Professor!" and collapsed in his chair -- the sturdiest one at the kitchen table, brought in just for him.

Charles wheeled himself to his spot at the table, and reached out to pat the back of Hank's hand. "You've been doing well by her, Hank, I'm sure she'll come back."

"If she doesn't get run over by a truck," Alex said, and shrugged to Charles' peeved glare. "They drive like maniacs on that road, because they only thing they expect to hit are deer, and everyone knows the deer are strangely avoiding this part of the county." He turned back to Hank for that last bit, and Hank favored him with a smile full of fangs. 

Charles hid a relieved grin, happy at the inside joke they were enjoying; he was peculiarly happy today, especially odd considering last night had been one of the unhappiest of the past few months. He ran his fingers lightly over his slacks, feeling the bandage taped securely in place and hidden by the cloth. He picked up the plate at his place and reached forward to the stack of pancakes, thoughtfully placed on his side of the table.

"Alex, I am sorry to admit I had my apprehensions when you lost your bet with Mrs. Tydahl, but your cooking is marvelous," he said after the first bite, and the young man shrugged in response, as if it would hide the fact that he was beaming under the praise. "And Hank," he said after the next. "This boy in the Midwest, or thereabouts -- he's a telepath of sorts that I've had some communication with, a sort of dream-mediated astral projection, but I'm not quite sure of the details."

"Do you recognize his signature from before?" While Hank asked, Alex reached nonchalantly across the table to take the bottle of maple syrup out of his paw; he'd forgotten about it and poured a quarter of the contents onto his plate while Charles was speaking. 

"No, I don't, and that's strange. Actually the whole thing is strange."

"Know what's strange? They're experimenting with hallucinogens to promote extrasensory perception down at Area 51. Do you think that would work?" Sean sauntered in, still in his rumpled t-shirt and yesterday's sweatpants, red hair sticking out every which way.

"What's strange," said Hank, "is that you still believe the nonsense you read in comic books, and yet you sort of look like a grown man." 

"And scream like a girl," Alex added with a snicker.

Sean raised his chin so he could look down on Alex. "Girls only wish they could scream like I do." Then he turned to Charles. "ESP-enhancing drugs, just think what we could do!"

"You know what I'm thinking?" Alex looked at Charles, gauging his level of tolerance for the day, then at Hank. "Supersonic dishwasher. Last one to breakfast does the cleanup."

"Excellent idea, my dear fellow," Hank concurred, pushing his pancakes around with his fork in an attempt to sop up all the syrup.

"And Sean, no." Charles said, putting his fork down and clasping his hands together beneath his chin, in the style of Professor Armstrong, a particularly severe and unflappable educator of genetics. The old man specialized in the sexual characteristics of amphibians, was never once observed to crack a smile on the school grounds, and certainly never lowered himself to acknowledge his students' jokes at his field's expense; Charles had loved trying to get that man's mountainous ego to shift or give, and never did succeed. Now he tried to evoke the old Professor as much as he could for Sean's sake, and said with as much gravity as he could muster, "Drugs and mutant abilities _do not mix_."

"Is that the voice of experience?" Alex inquired.

"Smart people learn from other people's mistakes," Charles said drily, enjoying himself far too much. He might be acting like an old man, now, but he certainly didn't feel it. "Hank, I'll come down to the lab after Rebecca and Tim are done with me this afternoon, we'll discuss it then."

"Wasn't she supposed to come in the morning, and Tim and Hannalore were this afternoon?"

Charles shook his head. "No, we decided yesterday that weekend visits can be reduced to one afternoon session each day. We'll still have morning sessions on weekdays, but Hannalore and Rebecca can alternate days, and afternoon sessions with Tim will be Tuesdays and Thursdays."

It was a roundabout way of saying that, yes, for the first time since October 28th, he'd gotten out of bed, emptied his bladder, bathed and dressed without assistance from anyone else -- and he had come down to breakfast looking much better kempt than Sean, which had to count for something. Things were looking up.

\------------------

Rebecca's perfectly calm and clinical expression remained frozen in place when she looked down at Charles' bare legs, even while her thoughts were racing with abject fear. For all that he'd read her mind plenty of times before, he hadn't expected that response.

"I'll have to report this," she said mechanically.

He looked at the two lines stretching neatly down his right leg, one faint, one still red and puckered, the scab just beginning to form. Tim would have no reason to see it when he arrived half an hour later; but Rebecca would need to know so she could avoid reopening the wound during the session. Charles had already decided to wipe her memory afterwards, and would do so after every session until it had sufficiently healed. "It was just an accident," he explained. "I was helping one of the boys with a model airplane yesterday, and discovered that I'm clumsy and Exacto knives are sharp." He smiled his best laugh-with-me,-I'm-so-charming-and-self-effacing smile at her.

"I still have to report it." Rebecca was sweating now. He took a quick peek inside her mind, and was astonished by what he saw.

There were grainy black and white photos spread out on her coffee table, a few of her dressed -- if barely -- in black lingerie, with people Charles didn't recognize, and two photos of people he did know. One of those photos was of Erik in Cuba, standing between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, his pensiveness and unease at odds with the good humor of the other two men. The other was a snapshot taken in a bar, red ink circling Erik and Charles in the background, beers in their hands, Erik telling a story and Charles laughing. The manila envelope they came in bore only her name and home address. 

"If you feel you must," Charles said, and quietly stuffed the memory back in its manila envelope and tucked it in the back of her mind. _Forget this for now._ He would retrieve it for her at the end, so she could do whatever it was she needed to, after he removed the memory of the evidence of the previous night's madness. "But it _was_ just an accident. I'm sure you understand."

Inexplicably relieved, she smiled and looked down again at Charles' legs, openly admiring the cuts. "I'll just get a temporary bandage on that, and then I can set you up with a clean one after Tim's done." _I knew it_ , she thought to herself, pleased. _I can always tell_.

He found it remarkably difficult to swallow after that, given her other thoughts. Thankfully she turned them off as soon as Tim arrived, like changing channels on a television, and Charles could focus on learning how to do the leg exercises himself without having to actively block out the completely inappropriate images of what Rebecca would be only too happy to do to him.

When it was over, after Tim had left with a promise and a threat to do a longer session on Sunday, and Rebecca had applied the new bandage and helped him back into his dress slacks, Charles reached in and erased the majority of their session together. Then he fetched the envelope with the photos and returned it to the coffee table, quietly sitting back and watching as she remembered them. This time she hadn't been prepared; this time her face betrayed her fear as she looked at him and saw the photo with the red circle in her mind's eye. " _I can't lose my job_ ," she thought, and " _they only want to talk to him, they only want to find that Communist_ ," and then her decision was made.

Charles smiled brightly and thanked her.

\------------------

Hank spent a full fifteen minutes telling Charles about the ideas of Vannevar Bush and the need for an integrated curricula focused on information classification, dissemination and retrieval, then launched into a discussion of the computers designed for managing US census data, with a brief tirade on the involvement of the International Business Machines Corporation with Germany's Third Reich, all delivered over his shoulder while pulling down various notebooks and folders stuffed full of mimeographs and copies of microfiches from the shelves in the lab.

"So how many John Turners are there, Hank?"

The broad shoulders sagged underneath the lab coat. "Several hundred, and that's just the Midwest. John Smith and Bob Johnson are more common, so it could have been worse, but it's still bad enough."

"He's young, not yet in high school. Green eyes, some freckles. Light-colored hair, blonde or light brown. Does that help?"

Hank scratched at the blue ruff at his neck, lost in thought. "I'll call around for school photos. Do you know if he's involved in any sports? I might be able to find something in local newspapers, although… there are a lot of local newspapers. At the CIA we had entire buildings full of people to do nothing but catalog all day long, and even so most things get glossed over."

Charles sighed. "I do wish we'd been able to figure out how to keep Cerebro, instead of just dismantling it. As it is, you've got me, Sean and Alex. Maybe we can impose upon the Tydahls as well."

Hank dropped the folder in his hands onto the lab table without bothering to look at it. "I've been working on designs for a new Cerebro." He shook his head at Charles' hopeful expression. "No, it's not going as well as I'd like. I had been pursuing an approach that made use of Mr. Lehnsherr's ability to modulate the data flow, and came up with a pretty good way of providing feedback to the user, but…"

"But Erik's not with us," Charles finished for him. "And it's hard to start again on a problem when you've already thought of a better solution." Charles nodded in sympathy. "Let's save that for another day." 

They were interrupted by the sound of pounding on the door to the lab, and Alex shouting for Hank to come out into the hall. Hank leapt across the table and swung the door open -- the movement fully graceful, filling Charles with good-natured envy -- and Duchess leapt through the open door and scurried behind Hank, her claws ticking on the linoleum as she slid in her haste. Behind Alex, Sean came running up, laughing, and Hank surprised them all with a deep roar. Himself, most of all.

"Easy Beast!" Alex cajoled, hands up, palms out. 

Sean pointed at Duchess peeking out from behind Hank's knees. "I'm a dog whistle!" he chortled, nonplussed.

\------------------

Duchess ran away for good the next day.

Mrs. Tydahl had found him on his way to breakfast to tell him about Rebecca's phone call at 7am sharp. Duchess had been padding quietly alongside the wheels of his chair, as though nothing were amiss. He'd gone to the foyer and the nearest phone to return her call, not wanting to trouble the boys with what he expected would be a preliminary attempt at blackmail or threats, but instead he got one of the receptionists who told him that, given his recent progress and the surprise on-site visit of a specialist familiar with similar cases, it would be best if Charles came to the clinic at the hospital in New Salem today for a consult. Rebecca had offered to drive him, just this once, since they were all trying to work around the specialist's schedule but didn't want to inconvenience Charles any more than they had to. He repeated the change in plans aloud for Mrs. Tydahl's benefit -- Mr. Tydahl typically drove him to the hospital when he had to leave the estate -- and when she opened the door to retrieve the Sunday paper, the dog bolted through it.

Sean shouted himself nearly hoarse, but she didn't return. Hank tried to track her, but lost her scent almost immediately. Charles promised Hank he would make Rebecca drive slowly and carefully down the road, controlling her every move if he had to, and if they happened to see Duchess, he would make her turn around immediately and bring the dog home, the appointment with the specialist -- _or the blackmailer_ \-- be damned. But even as he said the words, even as he reached out and took control of Rebecca, lifting her foot gently off the gas pedal to slow her car to a very sedate pace, even then he knew that finding out who was going after Erik and how much information they already had far outweighed the well-being of a pet dog, no matter how beloved.

An hour later, Rebecca led the way down the hall of rooms set aside for patient-doctor consults, her smart pink dress suit matching her pink nails. He wheeled behind her, listening for tension in the thoughts around him and finding it everywhere. He tried sifting through minds looking for a flavor of _duplicitous_ , and only found an intern thinking about cheating on his wife, not the unscrupulous information gatherers he had expected -- perhaps they didn’t consider their work duplicitous.

Certainly not the man who was waiting in the office for them, who dismissed Rebecca with a terse invitation to wait outside. Charles held still while the man introduced himself as John Smith, an employee of the Agency tasked with researching a suspected terrorist with ties to communist Cuba, carefully arranging his features to look surprised when the man tossed copies of the two photos of Erik on the desk for him to see. He rubbed his fingers against his temple, as if attempting to soothe away a headache.

Rebecca was outside the door, listening with all her might. _Go check your lipstick_ , Charles ordered her, and she immediately rose and walked down the hall to the restroom.

“Well,” Charles said, “as you can see, I'm surprised to find out this gentleman is so familiar with the Cubans, and I'm alarmed that you have a damning photograph of me having a drink in a bar with him.” He congratulated himself on being clever. “ _Why don't you mollify me by telling me everything you know?_ ”

“Certainly," Mr. Smith acquiesced immediately. "His codename is Magneto, and he delivered a manifesto to the Agency raving about so-called 'Mutant Rights' five days ago. He has been implicated in the disappearance of several members of a covert operations group over a month ago, and most recently with the kidnapping of a U.S. Senator and his family. Would you like a drink?” Mr. Smith asked smoothly, reaching into his bag and pulling out a stainless steel flask. There were two double old-fashioned glasses on the shelf behind him; the doctor whose office they were borrowing had a preference for Waterford crystal.

“Thank you,” Charles said, rifling through the man's memories, catching the image of him filling the flask the previous night with Lagavulin 16-year-old scotch and sealing it. Mr. Smith poured two-fingers’ worth each, placed the glass for Charles near the photo of him in the bar (Charles must remember to keep a copy, as it was a good shot of Erik in profile), and downed half of his own drink in a single gulp. Charles raised his glass in a convivial salute, and took a less hearty, but no less appreciative sip. “I do appreciate the peatier flavor of Islay,” he said, thinking of the night he introduced Erik to the full array of his highland scotch collection. And what a long night it had been...

He took another drink as Mr. Smith continued. “We have reason to believe that he may have been involved in the escape of one Miss Frost -- an alias, obviously -- although all records as to why Miss Frost was in our custody or under whose authority we were keeping her, or even the identity of whoever apprehended her, are lost, presumably stolen.” 

Distantly, he was aware of Rebecca's thoughts spiking in sudden surprise and recognition. He placed his nearly-empty glass down on the desk, and brought his fingers to his temple again in an attempt to concentrate, to break through the fog wrapping her mind so he could see whatever it was that alarmed her. Mr. Smith was speaking again, the words slurring together--

Charles watched, amused, as Mr. Smith faceplanted on the desk, his glasses making an unpleasant crunching sound as he did. Two men walked in with Rebecca in tow, and Charles greeted them happily--“ _Ah, Agent Levine, so nice to see you again! And Mr. Moore, I don't believe we've had the pleasure--_ ” 

Mr. Moore backhanded Charles, hard, sending him crashing through stars into a temporary darkness. He scrabbled his way back to wakefulness in time to hear Mr. Moore's words echo through Rebecca's memory-- “Fucking telepaths. Makes me hate my job, some days.” He tugged desperately at the edges of their minds, but nothing gave; and at last he sagged in place, relinquishing any control he might have had. 

Charles did not feel particularly clever any longer. Instead, he felt like he was wrapped soundly in a ball of cotton, through which only occasional snippets of conversation could be heard. Agent Levine's voice, in a low, condescending tone "…the liberty of clearing your calendar…" and sometime later, Mr. Moore said, "Boss, looks like we got another JT. And get a load of this -- he's crippled already," and from far, far away, in the background of somebody else's conversation, Emma said "Really? I'm surprised." Some time after that -- minutes, or perhaps hours -- Mr. Moore pushed his wheelchair out into the hall with Rebecca at his heels, and Agent Levine closed the door behind them, leaving poor Mr. Smith to sleep off whatever it was they'd been drugged with.

There was a jolt and a rattling, and his head rolled painfully to the side. A pool of saliva on Charles' lip gave way, drool sliding down the side of his chin. _That was a curb_ , he thought belatedly. A breeze, and sunlight warm on his skin -- _outside, the parking lot_. Mr. Moore's voice behind him, saying something urgent but indiscernible to Levine, and Charles' mind pulled up the memory of the last thing he'd heard him say: _Another JT_.

The initials wandered through the haze and landed in a fog bank on a hill. Once the connection was made, the realization shined in Charles' head with a sharp clarity, focusing in on a train of thoughts: _This isn't about rescuing Erik_ , Charles told himself, the words beginning to push the drug-induced haze away, _It's about rescuing John_. The adrenalin rush hit him like touching a live wire, reverberating through his sedative-addled body. “ _Stop!_ ” he ordered, reaching blindly out and catching only Agent Moore in his net. Behind the curtain of his eyelashes, through the corner of his half-lidded eye, he saw Agent Levine grab Rebecca's elbow and tug her forward, the radio in his other hand raised to his lips. The chair jerked suddenly, and the world tilted around it. “ _Sleep_ ,” he commanded Moore, unable to form anything more than the simplest words, his mind struggling to catch up with what was going on around him.

The ground was rising up and he was falling down to meet it, his body nonsensically expecting to hit sand, not the pavement that tore the sleeves of his shirt and scraped the skin raw. His head bounced against it with a sharp lancing pain, and his mind announced in a sing-song, _whiplash!_ and _mild concussion!_ and told him that his feet were _somewhere out of view, possibly tangled up in the chair_ , and added _isn't this a pickle you've gotten yourself into?_

"Bag it," Agent Levine shouted. The walkie-talkie squawked something back, and Charles felt the decision being made, heard tires squeal in response, betraying the impatience of the driver. From his vantage point on the ground he watched the wheels of a wide black car with government plates turn sharply, overcorrecting, then relaxing as the friction caught the back wheels and the entire vehicle lurched forward. Rebecca and Agent Levine were four feet to his right, and moving further away; Agent Moore was lying stretched out on his back with his head propped up against the curb six feet away, gone from Charles' mind, his feet almost close enough for Charles to touch, pointing towards him and the knocked-over wheelchair. There was nothing at all between Charles and the oncoming car except a dwindling amount of pavement and a shrinking volume of air.

He saw the entire thing again from the driver's perspective, noted the two candy-stripers – high school girls hoping to be nurses some day – already stepping towards Agent Moore to lend a hand, and he knew there was no good choice. Charles slammed the driver's foot against the brake, but struggled to hold the man's hands steady on the wheel. His head was still throbbing from whatever it was they'd administered to him, and his attention was stretched too thin to do so simple a thing as control a human less than twenty feet away. The man behind the wheel had managed to get the car to drift towards him at an angle with all four wheels clearly visible to Charles, and he knew he was trapped. There wasn't enough distance or time to stop it from happening.

Then the car jumped sideways, improbably, and Charles exhaled and blinked slowly, listening to the soft percussion of steel against flesh and bone, flesh and bone against glass, the impossible clarity of an empty high-heeled shoe hitting the pavement, followed immediately by a ton of steel crumpling itself against a cement pillar. He opened his eyes to see the bodies of Agent Levine and Rebecca fall to the ground twelve feet away, having flipped over the car entirely; he inhaled brake dust and smelled the burning rubber left in the car's wake; he heard the squeal of the now-bald tires, different in pitch than before, as the car finished twisting around the pillar and continued to slide past, hopping over the curb backwards and breaking through the decorative bushes, finally coming to rest with a loud crunch against the wall of the clinic's front entrance. 

"S'not you, Erik," Charles slurred in the shocked silence. His tongue felt thick and his lips were disinclined to move, and he had to focus all of his effort on enunciating the words so he could be understood. He didn't know if Erik could hear him or not; for all he knew, he was 300 yards away, crouched on the hospital's roof like a gargoyle. But he was here, somewhere, wearing that helmet. He wondered briefly if he could read lips, or what he thought of seeing Charles like this, sprawled and helpless on the pavement, the wheelchair collapsed behind him. But then he remembered the realization that had woken him from his stupor, and he forced the words out. "They have John Turner, and he's crippled," he said, letting the words fall into place. "They crippled him."

The world turned warm and soft as the sedative won out against the adrenalin, now that he had done what he needed to do. Voices rose up suddenly, all around him, and footsteps were hurrying back and forth, and someone was shaking him and saying something, and he would have sent the thought " _I can hear you_ " to them, but he couldn't, so he didn't.

\------------------

Charles opened his eyes and stared himself in the face. It felt like a very long time before he finally found the words.

"This is disconcerting," he said.

"This is making a point," the version of him that wasn't lying in bed answered. "If Charles Xavier just _has_ to put himself in danger, there are better ways to do it." He -- the other he -- sat up straighter as he spoke. He glared at Charles, then heaved a giant sigh and looked at the ceiling, blinking furiously. "You are so thoughtless," he continued while Charles watched the emotions play across the face before him. "Do you have any idea what would happen if you got yourself killed?"

It was a game Charles didn't have the energy for.

"Where's Emma, Raven?" He scowled at himself, and the other version of himself scowled back.

"Miss Frost is playing hostage, which is a role she's perfect for. You know why?" Raven-in-Charles'-shape leaned down towards him, close enough for Charles to grab by the neck if he was so inclined. "Because Erik doesn't care about her," she spat out. "And _I_ don't care about her. And we care about _you_ , you…" Raven-in-Charles'-shape screwed up his face, and leaned his head down as tears started streaming down his cheeks. "You _stupid_ idiot who almost got himself run over right in front of me!"

Charles reached up and held his sister in a tight hug, smoothing her -- his -- hair with his right hand and shushing her as she bawled into his shoulder. "Be yourself, Raven, please," he pleaded after the worst of the sobs had subsided, reaching out to see whether anyone had been alerted by the noise and finding Sean standing watch outside the door. "This is too strange for me."

He let her go, and she flickered into the shape he was used to seeing her in, the blonde girl he'd originally recommended as being the form his mother was most likely to approve of, albeit in a candy-striper outfit. He shook his head, thinking of Erik, and how Erik had been right in regards to Raven where he himself had been wrong -- Moira's memories had shown him that -- but she smiled, the tear tracks missing on this newly-made face but her eyes shimmering. "It's okay, Charles. I'm on a covert mission right now, and this is my disguise."

"And what, may I ask, is your mission?"

"Make the world safe for mutants," she said proudly. Her features clouded over, and she added, "only right now, it's make sure one mutant in particular is safe, because _another_ mutant is going to go over the edge if anything else bad were to happen to you, and then the world wouldn't be safe for anyone."

He couldn't feel her hip against his, but he felt the twist in his upper back from the depression she made on the mattress where she sat; he _wished_ he could feel her, so he crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her instead. "Please tell me Erik isn't walking straight into the trap they -- whoever the hell they are -- have laid for him."

She gave him a level glare back. "I don't know anyone who would do anything that stupid." Then she rolled her eyes and added, "Except you, of course. Oh, and him."

" _Heads up, Professor, head nurse at 12 o'clock_ ," Sean thought, and Raven leapt up to hit the nurse call button before Charles had opened his mouth to warn her.

When the head nurse walked in a minute later, she was blushing furiously, and Sean poked his head in the doorway and gave Raven and Charles the "okay" hand-sign. Charles greeted her, made some nice pleasantries about the kindness of candy-stripers and being grateful for the care he'd received from the hospital's excellent staff, and how he'd _just_ woken up, and impressed upon her the urgency with which he needed to return home. In the jumble of thoughts set into disarray by Sean's shameless flirting, he found the story that had been constructed so far of yesterday afternoon's tragic events -- _yesterday afternoon, a whole day lost_. Rebecca had been taking him back to her car after a short session, having received help from two nice gentlemen, and it was just bad luck that the wheelchair had caught on something and the gentleman pushing it didn't know how to manage it properly, and they fell in the way of a car, and the driver swerved to miss them and -- tragically -- struck Rebecca and the other fellow. Three dead, one presently in a coma, and the last miraculously walking away with only a severe concussion, although "walking away" was merely a figure of speech.

" _Yes_ ," Charles assured her, " _That's exactly how it happened_." 

And although everyone knew about the drunk man who slept it off in Doctor Williams' office and disappeared sometime in the middle of the night, everyone believed that was properly kept a secret from everyone else, so no one talked about it.

Tucked safely away in his coma, Agent Levine was barely responsive to Charles' probing, even when he was sitting right next to him, with one hand placed on top of his ("They say that sometimes people in a coma can feel human touch," the nurse said, unconsciously stroking the gold crucifix pendant at her throat) and the other at his temple. The most he could get were flashes of the car's final approach, as though the last memory was still waiting to be thought. Everything else was locked deep away, beyond his reach.

The only non-physical clue he had was Mr. Moore's thinking of Levine as "the new guy," and the fact that Mr. Smith -- a legitimate representative of the CIA -- had no idea that Moore and Levine were involved. Glassy-eyed, the nurse handed Levine's wallet to Charles, and stood stock-still while he flipped through its contents. A tab for a dry-cleaner in New Salem -- _so close to home_ \-- several dollar bills of various denominations, carefully smoothed and facing the same direction, a business card for dance instruction with Rebecca's number written on the back in her tidy script, and three cards with the seal of the National Center for Intelligence Gathering and "Samuel Levine, Field Operations, Extranormal Research Division" printed in dark blue underneath. A 1-800 number with a three-digit extension finished the card.

Charles kept the business cards -- including the one with Rebecca's number -- and handed the wallet back to the nurse. He released her after he'd tucked the cards safely away, and picked up a conversation thread in the middle about how very sorry he was that so much trouble had been caused on his and Rebecca's behalf. He let the nurse think she had lost track of his words, entranced by his smart British accent; it wasn't far from the truth.

\------------------

“I think I found your John Turner, Professor, but... Well, you can tell me.” Hank placed a copy of a newspaper clipping on the desk, courtesy of the new Xerox 914 downstairs in the lab. In it were headshots of two freckled boys, evidently school portraits, beneath a photograph of a tractor on its side and the headline “Tragedy Strikes Local Farmers.” Charles tapped the boy on the right with his finger, said “That's him. That's exactly how he looks.”

“Look at the date, Professor.”

Charles did. “1942? Ah.” He peered up at Hank, wondering when the boy had developed a sense for dramatic timing. “What's the rest of the story?”

Hank rubbed the fur at the top of his head, debating. “Hank…” Charles said slowly in a low voice, then thought better of it when Hank's thoughts darted to Alex, colored with confusion and chagrin. "There must be more to this story," he continued in collegial banter, switching tactics. "What is it?"

“Promise you won't do anything rash?” Hank pleaded.

The corner of Charles' lips twisted upward. It hadn't escaped his notice that an awful lot of people had been asking that of him, lately. Raven had said much the same thing when they said goodbye at the hospital, accompanied by a threat to assign him a bodyguard he couldn't escape if he refused. “How about if I promise to let you know if the situation warrants quick action and a… less cautious approach?"

“How about you promise to include us this time?” Alex sounded far too reasonable. “I think we can agree that this affects all of us.” Sean and Hank nodded. 

"Fine," Charles agreed. They'd clearly discussed this ahead of time, and he knew he ought to reward that, even though the thought of throwing them blithely into danger again was repulsive. _Not blithely_ , he corrected himself soberly, _Never again_. He looked at Hank expectantly.

"1942, Northern Illinois. Two brothers were working on their father's cornfields, late summer; the tractor got stuck climbing a hill to the main road and tipped over. The elder brother fell from the cab and was crushed under the wheel, sustaining serious injuries and dying shortly thereafter. He was known for having a "knack" with farm animals; there are several mentions of him being called in to help neighbors with animals that had gotten themselves stuck, cats in trees, that sort of thing. The younger brother was thrown further from the tractor, hit his head on a rock, and was in a coma for a decade."

Hank opened the folder and pulled out another newspaper article, this one with a photo of an older man with his head bowed, being pushed into the back of a police cruiser. "A preacher from his hometown was with him when he woke up. The court records state that he 'went to John's bedside because God told him to; upon seeing John, now twenty-one years old, wake up, he asked him whether he was doing God's work or not. Then the preacher beat him to a bloody pulp with a lead pipe before the nursing staff could pull him off, and John was in a coma for at least another five years. The damage was so bad, they had to amputate his legs."

"Dammit," Charles muttered, putting his head in his hands. He took a deep breath and looked up to meet Hank's amber eyes again. "Why do you say 'at least'?"

"Because men claiming to be with the Federal Bureau of Investigation took him into custody for his protection in 1957, and he hasn't been heard from since."

Sean gave a low whistle. Alex just nodded, leaning against a bookshelf; evidently he'd already heard this.

"Right. So, we have two things to do. First, rescue John Turner from wherever they're keeping him. Second, keep Erik from killing innocents in the process." He sighed. _And that's my fault, because I assumed they were responsible for crippling him._

"Great, let's go!" Sean said, leaping forward, then stopping suddenly, pitching forward on the balls of his feet precariously. "Wait. How do we know where to go?"

Charles pulled one of Levine's cards from his jacket pocket and placed it on the desk, next to the photos of the brothers. "We call them and ask for directions." 

Hank's ears twitched. He looked at the window that Charles had left cracked open to let in the spring air. “There's a motorcycle coming up the drive, Professor.”

They all looked at Charles expectantly; for a moment he stared at the window and the trees beyond in what felt like slack-jawed amazement, before he recollected himself and verified that he hadn't actually been sitting with his mouth wide open. “It appears we have a guest,” he said, “and I gather he means to stay for a while. We'd better go down and greet him properly.”

The low-slung Harley-Davidson was big and its engine rumbled loudly; its rider was bigger and, if possible, spoke in an even louder rumble, deep in his broad chest. “Here I am,” he announced, knocking the kickstand into place and swinging his leg up over the back of the bike in an easy, thoughtless dismount. “These your kids?”

“Hello, Logan,” Charles greeted him, settling the rising hackles behind him with a gentle petting of their minds. He wouldn't do it every time, but for the moment he needed to keep things from spiraling out of control. They could have their wrestling matches later. “This is my first class -- Dr. Hank McCoy, Alex Summers, and Sean Cassidy.”

“Beast,” Hank said, indicating himself. He nodded towards Alex, who was radiating smugness at Hank's acknowledgement of the name, “Havok, and Banshee.”

“Wolverine,” Logan growled. “Now that we're all warm and fuzzy, when do we eat?”


	4. Pack Up the Moon

Appearances could be deceiving, as Charles well knew. A painfully shy young woman could be the bravest person in the room, an awkward boy could be the most nurturing, and the largest, loudest person he'd ever met, who looked as though no four walls or barred cage could contain him, whose clothes looked fit to burst off his body at a moment's notice if he merely flexed the wrong way, could be perfectly at ease in the Xavier mansion. If the mansion was big enough for Logan, perhaps it would be big enough for ten more _gifted_ young people, or twenty. Maybe, someday, all of them.

Charles encouraged the boys to help him get settled and find an acceptable room, with the eminently capable Mrs. Tydahl overseeing the proceedings. Left behind, nearly forgotten in the quiet uproar instigated by yet another alpha male being introduced to the mix, Charles wheeled himself to his office, his desk, and his phone.

He took one of Levine's business cards from his wallet and flipped it over -- it was the one with Rebecca's number on the back -- and he hesitated for just a moment, his mouth gone dry. He swallowed, the moment passed, and the heavy black bakalite receiver was in his hand, his fingers on the rotary dialing the number. The familiar clicks sounded as the connection was made, and then on the far end a woman's voice greeted him with an icy "Hello, Charles. Or is it 'Professor X' these days?"

"Hello, Emma," he said, and there was a slight echo on the line, as if he was speaking into a great dark cavern or a deep well. "I'd like to say it's nice to hear your voice."

"Likewise. You should know that I'm not speaking just for myself, here." In the background he could hear movement, the shuffling of feet, a sole scraping against a hard floor. He reached with his mind, trying to follow the cables, but there was nothing for him to grasp onto just yet. "And I must say my new employers are delighted you called, and would love to meet with you in person to discuss the new terms of your old contract."

He was certain that the line was being tapped, recorded, and shared among who-knew-how-many pairs of ears. "You can tell them I haven't the faintest idea what you mean." 

"They," Emma said slowly, "are authorized to pick up where the CIA left off."

"Funny, that. There was never a contract with the CIA." The lie rolled off Charles' tongue easily. He had told himself it was necessary, had convinced himself it was true, and somewhere in the intervening months it had become second-nature. _We were never G-Men. We were always X-Men._

"I have found that bureaucracies --" and here her voice dripped with venom, so much so that Charles could practically taste the sour bitterness on his tongue, "-- seem to be able to remember things even when individuals… _forget_. And they can be very persuasive." He heard her voice give just a little there at the end. She hadn't been the least bit rattled by Erik's idea of persuasion in Russia, nor by Charles' admittedly rough foray through her mind afterwards; so he took it as a warning that someone had managed to frighten the ice queen. Who was, after all, a fellow telepath, for all that her skillset was more limited than Charles' own. She waited a while, perhaps to give it time to sink in, or for her handlers to give her another line to recite, or for her to regain her composure. Regardless, Charles was not about to cave and start babbling just to fill the silence, which was finally broken by Frost's terse, "Tomorrow morning at 9. Come alone."

She gave him directions.

"I'll have a driver with me," he said as he scrawled the description of the last turn on his notepad. "I'm sorry, but it can't be helped. You can thank the CIA for that."

"Really?" she asked with a hint of a smile in her voice, cold and calculating and so falsely light that it couldn't be anything but _mean_. "I thought that was Magneto's doing." He wouldn't dignify that with an answer, though she gave him plenty of time to do so, and when she continued, there was perhaps a little disappointment shading her words. "Well. As long as your driver stays in the car, he won't be bothered. Tomorrow, 9 am. Alone, driver stays in the car."

"My driver will have to fetch my chair from the trunk."

"Fine," she snapped into the phone. Her cheek brushed the receiver and her voice took on a distant, muffled sound as she spoke to someone else, "His driver needs to fetch his wheelchair from the trunk." And then louder again, directly into his ear, and sharp enough to make him wince: "But he returns immediately to the car and stays there while you attend your meeting."

Now it was Charles' turn to smile; once again he'd unsettled her, made her draw her attention away from him to someone else, and in that unguarded moment he'd gotten just a flash -- an impression of short-cropped hair incongruous with a black poorly-fitted suit, and Agent Stryker's visage somewhere in the background like a memory. _And wasn't that interesting?_

"Tomorrow at 9, then, Miss Frost," he said, and pressed his finger on the handset button to end the call cleanly before returning it to its cradle. "And Agent Stryker," he added quietly to his empty office, "you'd better hope I get to you first. But even then, I can't promise it'll be pretty."

\------------------

They decided to reconvene in his office when he called them -- reaching out to their minds had become such a convenient habit, easy as breathing, now that he had so many fellow mutants to practice his telepathy with -- and even Logan hadn't seemed the least bit surprised by the mental communication. The triple-A maps of the East Coast were spread across his desk when Mrs. Tydahl arrived with the tea tray, and on her heels followed Sean, then Alex, then Hank and Logan still eyeing each other warily.

"We have a matter requiring a quick response, and possibly a less cautious approach. We are here," Charles tapped his finger on the dot reading New Salem, "and tomorrow at 9 I have a meeting with my would-be abductors here," he reached over and pointed out a green smudge in West Virginia. "I'm allowed a driver, but otherwise I must be alone."

"I'm the driver," Logan said. "Any of you kids shape shifters?"

"No," Charles answered peremptorily, "and -- _No_ , Logan. It is vital that I go. As it's a small installation, I might even be able to take the whole place myself, sitting down the entire time."

Logan crossed his arms over his chest and had the _gall_ to look down at him. "With your hands tied behind your back?" he grumbled.

"If necessary." He'd been working on that. He was confident he had broken that habit well enough -- as long as he wasn't drugged -- but he gave Logan an easy smile just in case.

"It doesn't' matter," Alex butted in. "We're all going." He waved his hand before Charles could respond. "You guys can go in the front door if you want. The rest of us can find our own way in."

"I'd prefer it if the rest of you kept an eye on things from the outside and made sure we're not followed when we leave." Charles corrected. "And yes, that means I'd like you to be a part of this, if you're willing."

"Of course we're--" Hank began, accompanied by Sean's triumphant "yessss!", but Charles' upraised hand cut him off.

"There are reasons why you might not be willing to go." Charles said, his voice slipping into the professorial cadences he favored when his mind split things into lists and timelines, correlations and consequences. "Firstly, there's no Blackbird and no backup, so we'll all be responsible for making sure that Hank isn't seen by anyone or anything. I can't wipe a camera's memory, after all."

Logan muttered something low; Hank grimaced but said nothing in response, and only shook his head when Alex shot him a worried glance.

"Secondly, we haven't trained for this, and we don't have time to. Covering our tracks at the CIA was easy, because we had a _brilliant_ inside man." He glanced at Hank, mostly for Logan's benefit. "It could be that all we're looking at is a small installation, Agent Stryker's own private CIA in miniature, that has already been infiltrated by Emma Frost--" the boys' thoughts and expressions ranged from shock to surprise and curiosity, whereas Logan merely snorted at the name, "-- or we could be facing something much more entrenched. Presumably these are the people who've held John Turner captive for nearly 6 years."

Charles felt the anger building in the minds around him, itching at his edges. But it was Mrs. Tydahl, the epitome of a sweet grandmotherly soul, who gave voice to it first. "Those bastards haven't the right, Charles!" she burst out. "They ought to be cut down a notch or two. Alex here could do it, I've seen the havoc he wreaks on a daily basis." She nodded approvingly at Alex with a tight, grim smile. "If you burned the place to the ground, there would be no recordings from cameras or anything that might link the Xavier name to the place."

"Mrs. Tydahl--" Charles was supposed to be arguing with the boys, not with the woman who made them pies and nonchalantly swept up the tufts of blue fur that wafted across the hardwood floors. "We cannot engage in terrorism. It's not right."

"You cannot expect children to attend the Xavier School for Gifted Youth if this mysterious agency is just going to swoop down on them and steal them in the middle of the night!" Her words rang in the silence, and left him exposed and transparent. It was the thing he worried about when he forgot to worry about himself. Logan's mindset _shifted_ at her words, gone from resigned and slightly curious to a live wire poised for fight or flight, watching him with an unnerving intensity.

"Of course not," Charles said quietly, garnering nods all around. "But I would argue that we are in less danger of that if our enemies are unaware that we are a threat at all, instead of presenting them with a bigger one than they're expecting."

"But if Magneto did it--" Sean began, but Charles cut him off with a furious, "Absolutely not! We are in this mess because _I_ screwed up, and I will _not_ compound my mistake by implicating him, or Raven, or any other mutant!" His hand smarted from where he'd hit the arm of his chair emphatically.

"Professor--" Hank said carefully. "The recording material being used by the cameras is a magnetic tape, and if Mr. Lehnsherr happened to be there, he could -- what I mean to say is, a strong magnetic field can wipe those recordings clean. We might not have to burn the place down to cause the same effect."

Logan picked at his nails nonchalantly. "Or someone with very sharp claws could tear the tapes to shreds." He looked at Hank, openly sizing him up. "Mine are longer."

Alex, Sean and Hank all gave Logan disbelieving looks. "His are razor sharp," Alex pointed out, jabbing a thumb towards Hank. "And if you need a nail trimmer…" he glanced over at Charles with a question, and a cartoon-like image of a plasma burst neatly slicing Logan's fingernails and leaving him looking like a disheveled Wile E. Coyote popped into Charles' mind. Charles nearly choked on the laugh, attempted to cover it with a cough and counted himself lucky for managing it, if barely.

"Hank, can you make a magnet strong enough to wipe, say, a roomful of tape recordings?" he asked once he'd caught his breath, before the tension in the room could erupt into a boyish cat fight of epic proportions. "Or, if you were outside and could only communicate with me telepathically, do you think you could coach me through rigging up a solenoid that could generate a large magnetic field?"

Hank gave Logan a calculating glance, as if he were a piece of equipment in his lab. "Wolverine is essentially a rod of adamantium; depending on the size of the room, you'd need a pretty good length of conductive wire, but… yeah, theoretically it could be done. It would be easier if Mr. Lehnsherr--"

"I know." Charles held his hand up, letting the gesture speak for him: _Talk to the hand, please, I can't take it anymore._ "I know. Mrs. Tydahl, please accept my promise that when we are done, these people will not remember who we are, and will not come looking for the students. We will do our best not to give them any reason to remember us, and no matter the cost or how it plays out, I'll make sure to clean up any evidence that could lead back to us." 

Mrs. Tydahl nodded, satisfied, though her shoulders were still held stiffly. "I'll pack you some meals for the road," she said and stalked out, her heels ringing sharply as she marched down the hall. 

Charles exhaled quietly. It hadn't gone the way he'd expected, not by a long shot; but he felt more hopeful than he was reasonably justified to feel. He was buoyed by the thought that he wasn't going to face this one alone, and now that he'd learned his lesson in humility, no one was going to be blindsided, least of all him.

They discussed the logistics of the 9-hour drive, then got down to packing. A few hours of preparation was all they had to spare, even aided as they were by Mrs. Tydhal setting aside sandwiches and several thermoses of coffee and Mr. Tydahl making sure the vehicles were in proper working order and outfitted with extra gas cans and comprehensive kits should anything break down. They rolled down the drive and away from the estate at sundown, as the light faded into the soft shades of twilight. Midnight found them zipping along the interstate through Pennsylvania, curving along the valleys and ridges of the Appalachians. Logan drove the town car with Charles sitting impatiently in the back seat, trying not to wonder how much of a disaster it would be when Erik arrived and hoping beyond hope that Raven was being kept away from the intrigue. The boys were following in the van, packed with supplies for a number of scenarios, limited only by Hank's rampant imagination and the space requirements for transporting John and whatever support equipment he might need. One of those "supplies" was Logan's motorcycle, which Charles suspected was a security blanket in disguise. He reached back periodically to check on them, only to be treated to off-key renditions of Elvis Presley tunes, in stark contrast to the dead silence in the car and Logan's thoughts.

\------------------

Logan spoke sometime before dawn, pulling Charles from a dreamless sleep to look blearily at the outlines of huge trees looming over them and, in the occasional gaps, the barely distinguishable horizon.

"I heal fast. That's how I survived the Weapon X program and what they did to me." Logan kept his eyes on the road while he talked. "I don't know how much you learned when you found me at Earl's, but I haven't felt you poking around in here, so I figured I should just say it. I don't believe in mutants working for the government. Or being used by the government. I don't much like taking orders from anybody."

"Ah," Charles intoned quietly, but held his tongue. There would be time later to explain to Logan how Charles' particular brand of telepathy worked.

"Easy enough when it was just me. Still pretty easy when it was just me, and a couple of over-powered lunatics in the United States playing with the mob. But now there's kids involved, and I don't want to see any of them end up as Weapon Y or Weapon Z. A kid's gotta have a childhood, or else they'll just grow up to be monsters."

"Some will say they're monsters, anyway," Charles said. "Until there are enough of us to prove them otherwise."

"So you're in it for the long haul, eh?" Now those shrewd eyes glanced up and met his in the rear-view mirror. Charles said nothing as the realization hit him, but something on his face must have shown. Logan's lips curled upwards, and he said "Guess I better make sure you survive this, then."

They rode on in an amiable silence as the car climbed the highlands of West Virginia and the world around them gently filled with light. They skirted around the edge of the Monongahela National Forest, driving along a ridge until it tucked into the forest proper and turned to reveal an isolated valley far below, with a cluster of buildings and a paved road that was not included on any commercially-available map. They pulled over and waited for the boys in the van to arrive, and then, with Logan's aid, they found a good vantage point from which to study the lay of the land.

The compound -- for what else could it be called? -- was nearly identical to the facility the late Man in the Black Suit had run. It looked for all the world like a new office park built at the end of a curving road that could, in some young and exuberant urban planner's optimistic portfolio, accommodate an unhealthy amount of sprawling bedroom communities, should the economy desire it. This economy, however, desired helipads -- one large H graced a paved circle where a fountain would have been, tucked in the center of the circular drive, and another, smaller helipad could be seen on the roof of the complex's tallest building.

“Pretty quiet for a Wednesday morning," Hank whispered, pointing down the hill from the viewpoint to the front gate. The circular drive beyond the gate was conveniently empty; the parking lot less than a quarter full. "There are usually more early-risers and night-owls than this. But that's a lot of surveillance they've got set up." He pointed at the closed-circuit television cameras placed in clusters. "It looks like standard video surveillance, but they've arranged the cameras for nearly full-coverage. They might not have enough people to watch all the screens." 

"Let's find out, shall we?" Charles muttered to himself, and cast his thoughts forward and down, into the valley and minds below. He was barely aware of the thin wool blanket and the cold ground beneath that he lay on; but after drifting around and seeing only a few screens in lobbies, he pulled back into himself and discovered the annoying feeling that his _toes_ were cold. He imagined wiggling them and sighed; there was a time and place for indulging in such nonsense, and that would be later and at home, preferably in the library in front of the fire. "It looks like the only screens being watched are of reception desks and main doors," he said, handing his binoculars to Hank. "But it looks like they've got another Cerebro installation underway, the upper half is visible just beyond the rightmost building.”

“Yeah, I see it.” He accepted the binocs, adjusted them, peered through. “Good news is they're using the wrong antenna spacing; you haven't felt anything, have you?”

Charles shook his head. “No, but we should dismantle it regardless.”

From behind them, Alex piped up, “I'm pretty sure I can take it out from here, probably.”

“And give our location away before we even get started?” Sean asked. “That never works in the movies.”

“I'm more concerned about the ’probably’ part," Charles commented, frowning as he took in the lack of a separate road to the complex. He had hoped there would be an access road, at least, from some place in the national forest lands that bordered the complex; the maps suggested as much, but the best he could make out with the binoculars was a narrow dirt trail. "Alex, let's save the destruction for when you’re close enough to knock it out without wrecking the building next to it, shall we?”

“Wish we still had the Blackbird,” Hank grumbled. “It’d make this easier.”

“Easy, yes; subtle, no. You all agreed to the objectives of this little mission: find John Turner and liberate him, and if Erik’s team are here, keep them from killing anyone. While not getting killed or captured ourselves.” He congratulated himself for not stumbling over Erik's name; it was getting easier. "So, once again, gentlemen, what's the plan?"

Alex jerked his head upwards in a quick nod, a leftover gesture from the prison yard. "Banshee and I stay up here and keep watch; I stay in touch with you, Professor, in case you need us for air support or diversion." Sean yawned wide to relax his throat. "And if everything goes well, you call us in to pick up John in the van, and then I take Wolverine's bike and follow you home."

"No, you follow until we get clear of these chumps and you can relieve me as the Professor's driver," Logan corrected him grumpily. "And you don't wreck my bike."

"No, I just think about it." Alex replied with a roll of the eyes.

"I'll head down the trail to the back way, keep an eye on the loading docks at the back entrance and be ready to charge in if you need it." Hank recited.

"But?" Charles prompted.

"But I should focus on exit strategies."

"Yes. Logan?" Charles craned his head to look up at the big man on his other side, who was leaning casually against a tree with his arms crossed in front of his chest, as if he did this sort of thing on a regular basis. 

Wolverine snorted lightly, but he looked down at Charles with a hint of amusement. "We go in the front door. You do your mind-thing, we find this John Turner, load him in the van and drive away." He smiled tightly, his eyes roaming over Sean, Hank, and finally coming to rest on Alex. "And the kids stay out of trouble."

"Yes, well, hopefully we all stay out of trouble." Charles said drily. "And if the Brotherhood shows up?"

"We tell them we have this under control, and ask them to leave," Hank answered, then added with a slight show of fangs, _"politely."_

Logan put on a good show for the kids; he helped Charles back to the chair only as much as his help was actually required, held the door for Charles but stood by patiently and let him maneuver himself into place, and did not make any suggestion that their professor wasn't up for this. It wasn't until they had driven back down to the main road and turned towards the compound that he spoke up.

“You going in there’s a bad idea, Prof.” Wolverine nodded towards the road ahead. “Things tend to happen real fast once they get going, and you ain’t exactly the speediest thing on wheels, y'know?”

Charles allowed himself a small smile. “Thank you for your concern, Logan. I won’t stray too far from the exit.”

His watch read 7:45 when they drove through the last turn in the road and out of the trees. From the ground, the compound and its guardhouse looked much more impressive, seen through the tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

The guard at the gate did a quick double-take when he leaned around Logan to see Charles in the back passenger seat. Charles was ready to take control of the guard if he needed to, was already slipping into the calm mental space to do it, but before he tried the guard abruptly shook his head and said “Go ahead,” waving them forward. Just before Logan started to pull away, the guard added in a soft voice, clipping the words lest they be overheard, “Second building on the left, lower level.”

Logan rolled the window up before speaking again. “Don't know why we're bothering with all this make-believe when it’s obvious they know we're here, even though we're nice and early. Rolled out the red carpet, eh?”

“We don't yet know who has made the invitation,” Charles said quietly. "But that tidbit of information was courtesy of Miss Frost, I believe. I couldn't get ahold of that soldier's mind, it was as though it were wrapped in…," he thought for a moment, recalling a frigid Christmas holiday on the coast of Maine which seemed to have the same flavor, "…freezing fog."

"Sounds like a lovely lady," Logan said. "Can't wait to meet her." But he was thinking _"Like a fucking flash-frozen cod,"_ and Charles would have laughed at that if they weren't already pulling up to the curb in front of the second building on the left, leaving him directly in front of a security camera. He needed his concentration to convince the security guard at the front desk that both he and Logan were expected and not a threat, and he needed to do it without the tell-tale gesture of placing his fingers against his temples.

Erik had told him once that all the times Charles had accidentally bent the minds of those around him without intending to -- and more importantly, without the give-away hand gesture -- proved that he didn't actually need to rest his fingers against his temple to focus his power, that it was either a psychological crutch or a weakness he'd created for himself to put humans somehow at ease. The latter, Erik supposed, was due to Charles' own sense of discomfort with his abilities, which stung, because his pride wouldn't admit it but his head knew it was true. Erik's mind had been full of eagles with their wings clipped, which drifted quickly to the stylized black eagle standard that the Nazi party had used, and as complicated as that association was, Erik felt that Charles had more of a claim to the eagle symbolism than anyone, if he'd just stop clipping his own damn wings.

So he kept his hands folded on his lap, preternaturally aware of how cold and clammy they were, as he reached out to the guard at the front desk and guided him in to thinking _"Oh, they're finally here. The brass is expecting them; The fellows at the gate must have checked them out thoroughly and made them late, so no need to do that again, better make this quick--"_ and Private First Class Lewis made two checkmarks to the right of the two names next on the list, which had no relation whatsoever to Charles and Logan, and he stood up and went over to the door of his own volition -- mostly -- and held the door open, waiting patiently while Logan fetched the wheelchair for Charles.

"Thank you," Charles said politely when Logan wheeled him through the open door into the chill lobby. Nice, steady hands on the back of the wheelchair, patently, obviously, and without a doubt completely unthreatening. And Charles himself rifling unobtrusively through Lewis's mind, absolutely not a threat to anyone in this -- Charles clamped his jaw tight to keep a dismayed gasp from escaping as the map unfurled before his mind's eye, but Logan's sniff made it clear that the body's signals could not be hidden -- _gigantic_ paramilitary complex, a veritable ant-hive burrowing 9 stories deep into the earth and stretching out to incorporate some natural cave formations. Large portions of that map in Lewis's mind were grayed-out under the heading of "need-to-know-basis-and-I-don't-need-to-know". Somewhere, in that portion of the map, Charles was sure John Turner was being kept.

And probably Emma Frost, most likely still posing as a hostage.

_"Miss Frost,"_ he thought, reaching out, as gently as he could, shoving aside the taste of distrust at the back of his throat, the jealousy that tightened the corners of his eyes and made the back of his neck itch. An involuntary shiver coursed through him when his mind brushed near the edge of hers, like a cold mist just this side of freezing. A tendril of anxiety formed in the mist and uncurled, twisting to keep itself just out of his reach; she was distrustful of him as well, and she must have been just shy of her diamond form, barely open to telepathic contact and ready to tuck inside her crystal cocoon at the first hint of danger. Wherever she was, though, she was near. _"We're here for John, Miss Frost. We've no intention of interfering with the Brotherhood."_

He fully expected her to crystallize. He half-expected her to block him, or to try to hold him in place until Erik came storming through the door, and so he was quite surprised when the letters _S7_ appeared on the closed elevator door before him, shimmering like hoarfrost. Perhaps she couldn't bring herself to share her voice with him; perhaps she couldn't hide her dislike for him as well as he assumed he was hiding his dislike for her, or maybe -- and he felt this was more likely -- she simply found it easier to create illusions in the minds of others as opposed to projecting her own voice.

_"Thank you,"_ he replied, letting the gratitude slip like syrup over the words.

He pressed Lewis for the 7th floor down, and the man obliged as well as he could by handing over his elevator key, which Charles promptly passed on to Logan. _"We're in with no problems,"_ Charles thought towards Alex, the bright, fluid spot on the hill, and added _"it's a warren that extends to 9 basements; we should be in the 7th and out again before long."_ Alex replied with an image of Sean sketching a tic-tac-toe board in the dirt at their feet with an air of nonchalance, but it didn't hide the memory of Sean nibbling at his hangnails as they kept an eye on the car parked in front of Building 2. Charles turned his thoughts toward Hank, hiding in the shadow of the trees closer to the back entrance than he should have been, and relayed the same message.

"They've got a couple canine units, Professor," Hank said, the words spoken out loud an echo in his thoughts.

_"Fall back a couple hundred yards, then, Hank,"_ Charles thought to him. _"None of those dogs are Duchess, and you know I can't control animals."_

"It's fine, Professor. They've already been by once, the German Shepard didn't even twitch an ear my way, and I… I want to be close, just in case."

_"Fine, but…"_ Charles sighed as the elevator door finally opened. _"Be careful."_

"You, too."

The elevator door closed. Logan inserted the key, but no matter how much he pressed the button for the 7th sub-floor, the elevator remained resolutely still. Charles reached out and placed a hand on his forearm, just as he started to tense.

_"Let's keep our disguises as long as we can, shall we? Try the 6th level."_

Logan's thick eyebrows lowered. "Aren't we going to find your boy on the 7th?" he asked aloud.

_"Think it, and I'll hear it."_ Charles reminded him. _"Emma said so; but Erik doesn't trust her terribly much, and I find I'm not inclined to, either."_

That won a half-smile from Logan, who punched the 6th sub-floor button and grinned like a maniac when the button lit up a dingy yellow and the elevator started to slide downwards. Finally.

S1…. S2…. S3… the numbers of the subfloors lit up regularly… S4… S5… and although there was no perceptible change in the elevator's descent, it took twice as long for S6 to appear as he expected. The door of the elevator slid open a moment before the door sealing the 6th subfloor opened, and he caught a brief glimpse of a machine and a slender window giving a view of trees beyond, the view framed by a fall of blonde hair. Once they'd passed through and the double sets of doors slid shut behind them, Charles realized he could no longer sense Hank or Alex or Sean. Or, for that matter, Emma Frost.

_"Logan, I don't mean to alarm you,"_ Charles thought with all the sense of calm he could muster, _"but it appears I've been psychically cut off from the boys outside."_

"You don't say," Logan muttered.

_"But the good news is that I can sense the minds of the people on this floor and the floor below. And these chaps, obviously."_ The four guards standing at attention in the elevator's foyer immediately before the security doors leading to the hallway beyond remained standing rigidly at attention, as though frozen. _"And Miss Frost is held somewhere in a room with a view of the trees outside, upstairs."_ Charles' hand drifted upwards, but he bit his lower lip instead and willed himself to concentrate harder. There were seventeen people on this floor, and he was holding them all in place while he scanned through the minds of the men standing guard before him. One had the necessary security clearance; his memories clearly showed a guarded hospital wing on the 4th floor, and a glimpse -- in passing, once, anywhere between 3 months and 3 years ago -- of a man with a pale face dusted with freckles being wheeled on a gurney into the room marked 412b. The memory tasted of peppermint and wintertime.

"412b," he said quietly to Logan, "Mr. Samwell here has the appropriate access, if you would take his keys?"

Logan strode forward and snatched the keys from around Mr. Samwell's neck. He returned to Charles' side immediately and punched the up elevator button impatiently. "How long can--?" he wondered.

"As long as I have to," Charles said grimly. The elevator returned from wherever it had retreated to, and Logan wheeled him in backwards, thinking that Charles needed to see the people he was controlling. The doors closed, and he scanned his thoughts upwards only to find himself blocked. "But I'm sorry to say it appears to be a trap."

"Yeah, well, what else would it be?" Logan asked rhetorically and without rancor, stepping around Charles 

The doors of the elevator slid open with a squeak and a whine, and Charles's fingers were at his temple, the old bad habit back again. He reached out first to Wolverine, who turned on command without the slightest hint of realization that there had been a command at all. The larger man crouched slightly, spreading his bulk into a living wall, one that Charles hoped would be sufficient in case -- and yes, even as he fixed his eye's on Logan's and made contact with the minds of the men in the corridor, their trigger-happy fingers clenched down tight and the bullets sprang forward, propelled by nine tiny contained explosions. _Pat-pa-pat!_ the thick hollowpoint bullets blossomed upon impact, and Charles fought to keep his face neutral as Logan grimaced with the pain. He felt it, he felt all of it -- the flesh being torn open, the hunks of deformed metal thunking against Logan's adamantium skeleton and sliding down along the metal bones and out. 

"Thank you," Charles' hoarse voice sounded perfectly in accord with Logan's ragged breathing. "I'm sorry I couldn't catch them sooner."

"S'Okay," Logan gritted out through his teeth. He turned to glance over his shoulder when the first of their bodies hit the floor like sacks of wet cement, limp and unconscious. "Better me than you."

"You take bullets to the back far better than I do, Logan," he said. "Still…" Charles reached his free hand out to rest against Logan's chest. If Logan considered flinching, it was brief -- too much of his attention was focused on the pain, and this was what Charles gently laid aside. It took twice as long as usual to unravel the pain pathways while simultaneously making sure none of the unconscious men on the floor started to recover, but it was the least he could do. 

"It's just practice," Logan replied, and of course it wasn't that at all, but Charles wasn't about to argue. He stopped abruptly and stared at Charles wide-eyed, then twisted around to look at his still-bleeding side. 

"You won't feel it, so be careful," Charles warned.

"10 minutes is all I need. And we need to find a different way up."

Charles exhaled slowly and carefully pushed the mental map he'd acquired from Mr. Samwell downstairs into the forefront of Logan's mind, while struggling to keep the vicious headache that was starting to set up shop behind his eyes at bay. He'd expected mental exertion, but he hadn't expected this much of it so early on. Logan stepped into the hallway and began collecting the guns and extra magazines carried in little pouches on the men's hips. Charles wheeled himself out in his wake, being careful not to roll over anyone's fingers. "You know how to use one of--?" Logan started to ask from where he was crouched over one of the men, holding a pistol up, but when he looked up at Charles, his expression was one of surprise. "Hunh. That was the funniest sounding explosion I've ever heard," he said, and then the elevator behind them plummeted down the shaft, zipping off its lines.

"That's it, Prof," he said, handing a gun to Charles and tossing the rest down the shaft after the elevator. "Time to get you out of here."

"Not without John," Charles said, flicking the safety on and wondering where to put it, finally opting for simply laying it on his lap. "We might not get another chance at this." Logan looked for a moment like he was considering throwing Charles over his shoulder and running for the stairs, but there was indecision there. Charles could feel that the scales hadn't yet tipped one way or the other. "I'm not ordering you, I'm asking you to consider what will happen to him if we leave him behind."

They were magic words, and Charles knew it before Logan's jaws clenched. "They'll bury him alive and we'll never find him," he snarled. "412b it is. But if we come to a closed door, I go through it first."

"Agreed," Charles said. "If you push my chair for me, I can focus on making sure the people around us are conveniently out cold." He found he was smiling; he'd always wondered how many people he could control, given the need, and so far it turned out to be more than he'd expected, at least when they were nearby. And now that the elevator was out of his way, there might be a gap in the shielding through which he could reach Alex or Hank.

With his attention divided between holding all the humans he could reach unconscious and reaching up the elevator shaft to search for the boys, he almost didn't understand what he was seeing with his eyes. Logan cursed and stumbled to his knees, but only for a moment. He leapt forward quickly, the momentum carrying him forward while his legs coiled underneath and he _twisted_ in mid-air like a cat, adamantine claws extending with a _shnick_ as his arm sailed out and missed Charles by a hair's breadth. "Get out of here, Professor," he snarled, "I'll hold 'em off." He looked around wildly, his nostrils flaring wide and his eyes focusing on empty air, and with a curse he swung out again and pounced on nothing, his claws sliding forward at the end of the arc to slice into a shadow.

Charles abandoned everything else to try to slip into Logan's mind, but he came up against hard diamond walls with spikes. "Logan, listen to me, focus on my voice!" he said, but he knew it was no good -- Emma's illusions stopped the ears, closed the eyes, replaced the tactile senses. "You know exactly where I am," he tried again, still feeling the crystalline wall for a crack, a thin spot, a spike less sharp than its neighbors, _anything_. "You can smell my aftershave, focus on that, that's real--"

The full force of Logan's weight crashed into him, sending the chair backwards against the wall, the spikes of his claws coming to impossibly infintessimal sharp points before Charles' eyes. In his peripheral vision he could see the other set of claws, pressed through the cloth of his slacks.

_That probably hurts_ , he thought to himself. In fact, he was pretty sure he could feel it, the muscles crying out _make it stop!_ and his spine most likely answering _sorry, we're rather busy right now_ , as the cloth under the claws turned dark and damp.

"What did you do with the Professor?" Logan growled, his pupils tiny pinpoints of dark. Charles could find no purchase on the diamond shield around his mind, could only watch as Logan drew his right fist back, the claws in his leg grinding down with the movement. Charles's hands were on Logan's chest, trying in vain to push him back.

There was bile in the back of his throat. _That's from the pain_ , he told himself gleefully, perhaps madly. _I can feel it. Perhaps I should let Emma know how this feels._

The wall around Logan's mind had a tail, a glittering thread he could not sever. He swept along at it the speed of thought and found, at the bitter end, a twisting sharpness he could almost wrap his mind around…

A sound pulled him back, a deep reverberation that echoed in his torso and along his arms, and made his chair hum. Wolverine flew back with a shriek, impacting the far wall hard enough to crack the cement blocks, pale green chips of paint falling to the floor beneath.

"You double-crossing--!" Erik's face was twisted in rage as he strode into Charles' field of vision. The cape and helmet did nothing to hide the fury his entire body expressed. Logan screamed as Erik's hands twisted the air, the movement mirrored in the fields around Logan's body.

"Erik, no!" Charles shouted. "It's not him, it's Emma! That woman is--"

_in my head._

The world went white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I miscalculated the length of the final chapter and had to split it into two; it does land rather neatly on a cliffhanger, but I hope it doesn't come across as some sort of cheap trick. This part of the story was the hardest for me to write, as it's the bridge between all the turmoil that came before and the final showdown at the end, and my muse didn't feel like showing up for most of it.
> 
> The scary thing is that she showed up for Chapter 5.


	5. Funeral Blues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was not originally intended to stand on its own, but the "bridge" section in chapter 4 was lengthier than I anticipated. If you have been following this story serially, you may want to re-read the previous chapter to get the pacing back and recall how it was that our heroes managed to get themselves in this mess.
> 
> Comments and critiques are always welcome!

It was snow, at first. He was standing in a blizzard, tiny shards of ice flying hard and sharp in his face, nothing but white in every direction he looked.

" _Emma Frost!_ " he yelled into the storm, reaching outwards with his mind, feeling the jagged edges of the wall around him retreat and coalesce into a shape, too distant to make out clearly. He pushed further -- he had tracked Moira for nearly two hundred and fifty miles, he could no doubt catch this woman who must be within two hundred and fifty yards at best -- but like Zeno's Achilles chasing the tortoise, she remained impossibly out of reach. So he tried a different tactic, rooted himself firmly in place, and let the snow come to him. He felt the peculiar cold, tasted it on his tongue, smelled the air and, instead of the whiff of perfume Emma had worn in Russia, a heady concoction of rose and jasmine and musk, he caught the scent of fallen leaves molding at the base of birch trees, of wheat rotting in the field.

" _John Turner_ ," he thought aloud.

" _Hello, Professor_ ," the boy stood before him, pale skin and green eyes much older than the boy's body suggested. " _Thank you for coming to find me._ " The blizzard winds had stopped abruptly, and the field on which they stood was covered in deep drifts of snow, glinting painfully bright under the winter sun.

" _I thought the government was using you as bait, but it's Emma?_ " Charles asked. John just smiled. Charles tried once again to reach out, and could just barely feel the presence of Emma Frost in her crystal form somewhere far away. Closer -- but no more accessible -- he could sense Logan's mind whirling in a rage, and many, many others, all human. Charles shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and felt a slight give underneath, heard a faint squeak. He scuffed his feet to reveal the ice below, and when he looked around again, what he had assumed to be a snow-covered field was evidently a frozen lake. A skinny icehouse stood half as far away as the trees lining the far end of the lake shore.

" _Oh_ ," Charles said, the realization dawning. " _Emma is using the government to catch a bigger fish, and **I'm** the bait._ "

John's smile turned into a grin and he shook his head. " _Naw, it's more complicated than that. The way she puts it, there's only enough room in the world for one game to be played, and the game you two are setting up doesn't really fit in with what she's got going on. You and Magneto both want to change the world, and the Hellfire Club just wants to use it._ " John stuffed his hands in his pockets. " _The world owes us. Well, it owes me, at least._ "

" _John, you need to know -- no matter what she promised you, Emma Frost only thinks of herself._ "

There was a rumbling from the hill on the far side of the lake, a tumble of snow cascading onto the flat plain, answering John's laughter. " _That's really rich, coming from you. The lesson, **Professor**_ ," and he bit the title out with snide relish, " _is that **everyone** only thinks of themselves. I've been in their dreams, I've seen who they really are -- not just what they think of themselves, not just how they fool themselves into thinking they're such good people at heart_." The world of John's dreamscape grew colder and dark with his words. " _I've seen **your** dreams,_ " he added quietly.

A wave of anger could have thrown him out of the dream, maybe toss him back into the waking world where he was no doubt needed; but the cold hatred from John held him frozen in place. Charles tried to move his feet and couldn't, and when he looked down, he found his shoes were encased in ice.

He sighed. " _John, we're here. Myself, my students, my friends -- we've come to get you out of here, help you live the life you deserve, free from--_ "

For a moment, he felt as though the ground had been pulled out from under him, even though his feet were still frozen quite in place. He caught his balance roughly and, disoriented, twisted around to try get his bearings. Muffled pops and squeaks answered him. 

John was now safe on the bank to his right, a slight figure hunched over beneath the weight of a winter coat several sizes too big. " _Free from what, fear and pity?_ " he called over the distance, the echo of his voice sounding peculiarly flat to Charles' ears. " _Hiding in your mansion hoping that when I'm found, I'll be such a **good person** that no one will try to hurt me or use me?_ " 

" _That's not what--_ " 

" _Oh, I'm not goody-goody enough for you, I'm not a super soldier that Magneto would want, but I'm **wily** enough for the Hellfire Club. I deserve to be in the Hellfire Club._ " His words rang with conviction, and the crackling noise underneath Charles' feet grew louder. " _And from what I've seen of **you** ," John continued with a scowl, "you've already gotten more than you deserve._"

Charles would not panic. He'd been on thin ice before. " _It's not about what we're given,_ " he said, reaching out as he did, looking once again for the minds physically near him, and finding only humans riding high on adrenalin and stress, " _it's what we choose to do._ " He tried to touch one -- just one hazy shadow of a mind -- but it was so cold he could feel the edges of his own mind being coated with hoarfrost.

" _I never had a choice!_ " John yelled, snapping his attention back to his prison, his jailer. " _I never had a fucking choice! And now that I have one, I'm taking it. And you?! You know what's going to happen when we let them have you?_ " John vanished into the thin, cold air, leaving the winter world abruptly empty; but the boy's last words were a whisper in his ear: " _You're going to break._ "

The ice cracked open with a loud popping that echoed off the distant snow-covered hills, and Charles was abruptly immersed in cold water, unable to breathe. 

He sputtered, gasped for air, opened his eyes, shook his head -- drops of cold water fell from his hair onto his face, droplets caught on his eyelashes -- and the man with the empty bucket turned his back on him. Charles reached out into nothing, and was startled to hear a ragged cry of shock tear from his own throat.

The numb spot that had been Erik was now everything and everywhere.

His arms were tied to the arms of a wooden chair with nylon cord that bit into the bare skin. The pressure against his arms was in sharp lines, cutting into him, unlike the pressure at his temples, which was more like a vise wrapped around his head.

A wiry man stood watching him with open, calculating eyes. He blinked firmly -- a double blink, the kind of blink artillery men developed during the Great War -- and watched Charles silently for a couple of heartbeats.

"So you're a doctor," he said, his voice quiet and too calm. "You don't specialize in any kind of surgery, do you?"

"I'm not that kind of doctor," Charles said, trying to be just as calm as his interrogator, trying to tone his accent down, trying desperately not to seem too much of a snob, or too posh, or too Oxford. He couldn't help the shivering, though. "I have a PhD in genetics."

"That's too bad," the man in the uniform said. "I'm a field medic. Trained with the Rangers. I was at Pointe du Hoc." 

Charles supposed that explained things -- the blink, the uncanny stillness, possibly even the lack of recognizable insignia on the man's shirt. "You have my thanks for that," he said, letting his voice fall into its natural British cadence.

The man nodded, but otherwise continued as if Charles hadn't spoken at all, "So I know a thing or two about the human body, I know how to fix things. But I can't fix what isn't broken, you understand."

Charles barely had a moment to prepare, there was so little warning in the man's movements; but it was enough. He turned inward, found the point in his mind touched by the nerves in his right arm, and envisioned it wrapped in thick cotton just as the man swung his fist in a sudden arc and brought it down on the radius at its thinnest point above the wrist, smashing it against the ulna with a loud snap. The man looked up to meet Charles' gaze without blinking, a wholly unnatural thing, but Charles refused to be unnerved. It hadn't hurt. It hadn't felt like anything at all.

"Just as my mutation allows me to hear people's thoughts, and even make them think certain things," Charles explained calmly, striving to speak slowly but without being condescending, "I can make them not think things that might naturally occur to them, such as pain. And while the thing on my head is keeping me from affecting any minds external to me, it can't stop me from affecting my own mind. I won't feel pain as long as I'm conscious, and I can't feel pain if I'm unconscious."

_Checkmate_ , he thought.

The man made a noncommittal noise and turned to his partner, or underling, the man with the bucket. He tilted his head towards Charles, and another bucketful of cold water slapped him in the face coming from the right -- but just as he released his breath, he was punched hard on the left cheekbone. His whole head snapped to the right and his concentration failed when the medic gripped the broken bone between his fingers and bore down on it.

Charles screamed. 

_Just 'check', apparently_ , he thought to himself when the screaming was over.

"I've worked with telepaths before," the man explained, then added conversationally, "Being a medic, you get used to people around you hurting. Pain's okay. Some people try to hold it in, some people just scream it out. Doesn't bother me either way. I just make sure to put bodies back together so they can heal later." He patted Charles' leg, and Charles looked down to see that the right leg of his slacks had been cut off at the upper thigh, and a bandage placed across the mid-thigh where Logan's claws had cut through the skin. His thoughts snagged on the irony of it, that the new gashes must have obliterated the traces of his ill-conceived experiment with Erik's dagger. "Management says the only thing I need to worry about is keeping you alive and your brain intact. You've got a lot of body here that isn't necessary for those objectives."

Charles could feel his leg throbbing under the bandage. It was weak, but it was there. He sighed -- to be so close, to have the recovery of his legs dangled before him like sweet grapes, and then to have it snatched away for the sake of cruelty -- it was too much to bear thinking about, so he chose not to. He was in a cold, clammy place, an oddly-shaped room with no windows and very little metal that he could see, with a thick wooden door on the far wall left wide open.

"We're making good progress here," the man said, and he could as well have been talking to himself. "If we can keep this conversation up, it shouldn't take too long, and the damage will be minimal."

He hurt Charles again. Pulled a finger out of its socket, and let the yanking motion jar the entire arm, setting off a familiar, fast cascade of pain that Charles shut off again before it could swell to something beyond his ability. His mouth tasted like blood from where he'd bitten the inside of his lip, but that was a little pain, hardly worth shouting over. The man did not react at all, just moved methodically to the next finger and gave it a sharp tug, dislocating it efficiently. Then he twisted the two together and gripped them in one hand while he backhanded Charles across the jaw with the other.

The game, as Charles came to understand it, was simple. Charles was the bait set to trap Weapon X -- by which they meant Logan -- and Magneto -- _how dearly they love their code-names_ \-- by which they meant Erik, but the bait would only work if the intended prey knew where the bait was being kept; and moreover, the trap would be more effective if Logan and Erik hurried to the bait, so motivation was provided by indicating that Charles was in danger. Thus, the medic's job was to make Charles scream, and he in his turn would do his utmost to avoid screaming. When it became clear that the medic and his underling were gifted at making him hurt in multiple places at once to break his concentration, he simply focused on turning off his ability to make any sound at all; twice, the pain alone rendered him unconscious, and each time he counted that as a win.

* * * *

"I'm thinking of a number. Can you guess it?"

"No," Charles answered in a hoarse whisper. _Rub it in_ , he thought dimly. _Go ahead_.

"Six." His torturer stood at ease, feet hip-width apart, shoulders still perfectly level and held back, considering the papers he held in his hands. "Six mutants came here with you; two young men on the hill, one… ape of some sort… in the woods, one doppelgänger who for some reason keeps turning into a woman -- no doubt intending to manipulate our more sentimental boys -- and of course Magneto and Weapon X.

"You should know we have the upper hand on every one of your mutants that are in the building. It's just a matter of time before we capture the ones you stationed outside."

"I came by myself," Charles managed to say with his raw vocal cords rasping away. He was finally too exhausted to try to manipulate his own sensation of pain, and moreover, he found that he didn't care anymore. It just hurt, like swallowing fire.

The medic nodded. "You understand that management was prepared in case the White Witch had you figured wrong. It doesn't matter that your boys destroyed JT's amplifier. We've got you, now." 

_This is where I say "Alright, you've won,"_ Charles thought to himself, but he couldn't make his lips move to mouth the words. 

"You're fortunate that management is still willing to discuss the terms of your contract." Cold, slim fingers lifted Charles's chin up, made him peer through eyes nearly swollen shut and face the man he'd been trying to think of in only the most clinical terms possible. The intent stare had been hard to take earlier; now it was just unreal and flat, like a bizarre painting he'd looked at too long. The caricature of a person appeared to smile. "You can't expect them to be so favorable, though."

He _meant_ to say something nice -- polite, even. He meant to grovel. He wondered if he might cry. Instead, he said:  
"Tell Stryker to suck my dick."

Charles was sure he heard a snap when the wind was knocked quite solidly out of him. The chair toppled over and he went with it, in a giant, aching, painful mess onto the cold stone floor. The medic's hands were on him again in a heartbeat, lifting him and the chair back into an upright position in the middle of the room. Those hands ended up on his shoulders, steadying him; those eyes boring into him as he reminded himself not to panic, he'd had the breath knocked out of him before. His lung _probably_ wasn't punctured. The broken rib was _probably_ being held in place by muscles that couldn't relax, anyway.

"I'm sorry for overreacting," the medic said, interrupting his attempts at dispassionate objectivity. "I'm going to step outside for a moment." He left the room. 

The bucket-man looked at Charles thoughtfully and whistled low, just like Sean did whenever Alex said something particularly scathing at the breakfast table. Then he said in a surprisingly soft voice: "Hey, if you can pee sitting down, you should do it now. Just get it over with before he gets back." Charles could only stare at him, dumbfounded. "He can get a little weird," the man added with a shrug.

" _You don't say?_ " Charles thought to himself in the driest tones he could muster. He tried not to let his guard down, but at the same time, he didn't know how long the respite would last. He disregarded the man with the bucket and his bizarre advice, let his eyes close, and counted his heartbeats until his muscles relaxed and he could breathe somewhat normally again. 

841 heartbeats and 73 breaths later, a man in a black suit and a military haircut walked in the room and stood before him with a black leather folder tucked under his arm. The medic walked in behind him wearing a fresh shirt and slacks, his short-cropped hair slightly wet. He maintained a respectful distance behind the suit and did not make eye contact with anyone in the room, merely looking in Charles' direction without actually looking _at_ him per se. 

"Well, Professor. You've had a rough morning, I see." New Jersey accent. False jovialty. "That's what you get for not following instructions." He slipped the folder out from under his arm, flipped it open, pulled out a pencil and ticked something off.

As the man in the suit spoke, the medic stared. After all that had passed between them so far, Charles discovered the man could still elicit dread, cold and heavy in the pit of his stomach, twisting it into a sour knot, once he realized what held his attention so: the medic was keeping his gaze locked solidly on Charles' jugular.

He swallowed uncomfortably, licked his cracked lip and tasted blood, tried to ask "Who are--", but was cut off by an impatient, "No interruptions. Do not speak unless I've asked you a question." More scribbling on the pad of paper, which Charles guessed was more for show than anything else.

The man in the suit pulled out some glossy papers and snapped the folder shut. He handed one to the medic, who walked up to Charles and held it down in front of his face -- a black and white still of Logan in a stairwell doorway with Shaw's -- Erik's -- helmet on his head, looking none too comfortable. The perspective was from a camera perched somewhere near the ceiling, and from the snarl on Logan's lips and the way his claws were aimed straight at the viewer, this was most likely the last image the camera would ever record.

"Can you control Weapon X?" the man asked.

Charles laughed -- or at least, he intended to laugh. It sounded more like a sob to his ears, but in his heart he was laughing. 

The medic turned to the man in the suit and said, "No, he can't." The suit handed him another photo, and he promptly crouched down in front of Charles again so he could watch his face as he looked at it. Charles resolutely ignored it, and looked at the man in the suit instead, saying "I gather this man here is a telepath, then?" He had to concentrate to keep his words from slurring; half his face was numb.

"How about him?" the suit prompted, disregarding Charles' attempt at sarcasm.

It was Erik in the photo. He would recognize the self-assurance and the lithe form anywhere, under any guise. Even with one eye now swollen shut and the other watering, and him trying so hard not to look.

"Yes," the medic said, smoothly rising to his feet and returning to stand beside the man in the suit. "He's very confident about that."

Erik, of course, wasn't wearing the helmet. The interior shot looked like the elevator lobby on the subfloor where he had lost telepathic contact with the outside world. Logan must have been on his way to rescue John, and Erik was likely on his way here, safe from Emma's reach, or so he must think to have given his helmet to Logan. The scientist in him argued that there were many possible scenarios, and the more likely ones did not involve Erik and Logan taking the time to discuss how to best achieve Charles' goals; but at this point, _hope_ did not demand _sense_. 

"Your early arrival compressed our timeframe, but I'm glad to say we've recovered quite well. Thank you for your cooperation, Professor." The man in the suit wrote something more in his notebook, and leaned over to whisper in the medic's ear, nodding in Charles' direction. Then he addressed Charles directly once more, saying "We prefer to take care of our tools, not break them. Keep it in mind."

_Whoever the hell you are_ , Charles thought, _I'll break you._ He immediately regretted the words, recognizing the taste of madness that clung to them. But it was hard not to enjoy the renewed rush of energy at the thought.

"You can bring him in, now. I'll go deal with the others," the man in the suit said to someone outside the door as he left.

Two men led, one man followed, and in between them stumbled Erik, lassoed at the neck by nylon cord, his ankles and wrists similarly bound, his head covered by a sopping wet dark cloth sack. Charles gasped his name aloud before he could check himself; Erik's head jerked in his direction, his body tensing, and the soldiers with him pulled the cords tight.

"Don't--" Charles began, but whether he was going to say "Don't do that to him," or "Don't let him see me like this," it didn't matter; the medic pulled the bag off Erik's head and stepped aside so they could see one another clearly, and the soldiers kept the cords tight, so the skin underneath turned an angry red under the lights.

He expected anger. Steel-hard eyes and lips pulled tight, jaw clenched and brows furrowed; this is what Charles expected to see, not the open mouth, the slumped shoulders, the look of a man about to weep. 

He smiled, or rather, he managed a half-smile on the side of his face that wasn't numb. "'S'been worse," he managed.

The medic grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up, placed a something sharp against his jugular. Twisted painfully like this, he could barely see Erik; the world had turned into a watery blur.

"Plastic, nylon, ceramic, glass," the medic recited the list calmly. "Non-conductive, non-magnetic materials, things our Magneto here cannot control. But with the proper motivation, we can control Magneto."

"By killing me? Now?" Charles gritted out through his teeth, squeezing his good eye shut. "'S' hardly motivational."

The only response to his bravado at first was a growl from Erik. He had to open his eye again when the growl was abruptly cut off; "Please!" he begged as he watched them nearly choke Erik unconscious. "Please--," he whispered, for all the good that did anyone. He could not reach out and calm Erik with the device blocking his powers, could not take the pain away for him, could not help him seek out the slightest piece of metal that might help in some way; he was himself so far from both rage and serenity that he could not find the place in-between, not even to force their hand by making his own heart stop. The medic continued to hold him in that painful position; the man was like a machine, holding perfectly still with his eyes trained on Erik for what felt like several minutes. Presently he withdrew the black blade and lowered Charles' head, but kept a tight grip on his hair, as if he might scalp him on general principle.

"I am authorized to tell you that Magneto will be executed if we cannot be assured of controlling him," the medic explained. "We have already been provided with the means for containing Weapon X. Management will determine how best to deal with the rest of your people, Professor." He double-blinked hard, focused completely on watching Charles' reactions to his words. "The usual MO is a thorough post-mortem," he added.

_So that was it._ Charles felt his shoulders fall as the tension left him. "I can't--" he started, choked on his words, and tried again. "I can't let-- They're good kids. You can't just kill them."

"Don't make us, Professor. If you cooperate, and agree to control Magneto for us, things might not have to go that way." 

He didn't say a word, but he didn't have to -- he couldn't help but think of how slipping into Erik's mind was like slipping into the warm ocean, inviting and gentle and so very, very powerful. It had become second nature, back when they were friends and on the same side. The medic, his torturer, was frighteningly attuned to whatever it was that gave him away; he nodded, satisfied, and reached for the tight band strapped to his head.

"Charles--" Erik said, and his voice was as broken as that day on the beach in Cuba. 

He met Erik's eyes -- steel-grey in the fluorescent lighting -- and he wished for all the world that he had learned to be as expressive with his eyes as he was with his mind, so that Erik and Erik alone could understand what was in his heart. But whatever his expression was, Erik clearly misunderstood it, for the fight in him slipped away as Charles watched, and he merely nodded in acceptance. "It's alright," Erik said, defeated.

Of course it wasn't alright. It wasn't going to be all right, not at all, not even a little bit. 

"I'm sorry," Charles said as the medic lifted the mind-numbing headpiece off of him. "I am _so sorry._ " He looked the medic in the eye as he said it, and became a flood, filling every nearby human mind as quickly and completely as he could. He moved the nearest first -- the medic lifted the ceramic blade to his jugular and sliced it open with a graceful efficiency, and Charles watched with double vision as the blood spurted out before him, and from beneath him as though from his own throat -- and then the rest, one by one, simply ordering them to _stop_ , stop their lungs, stop their hearts. The flood of his attention was preceded by a ripple of horror in the minds of those nearest the edges, the ones that could see it -- however briefly -- coming.

Charles washed from one mind to the next, his world nothing but a blur of dead or soon-to-be-dead human faces, all men with short-cropped hair and muscles trained for killing, men with families and friends and hopes and regrets. He found Raven, yellow-eyed and blue-skinned, huddled in a corner trying desperately to shape a broken leg whole again as the men whose minds he visited dropped their guns and then dropped to the floor. He saw a bare-chested Alex glowing red, standing protectively in front of Hank, who was burdened with an unconscious, bound Sean slung over his shoulder, before Charles dispatched the men who had chased after them. As the flood swept out and up, snuffing minds along the way, he caught a brief glimpse of Logan in the helmet, his face wild with fury, framed by a hospital curtain on one side and a slim window with a view of trees beyond on the other, just before Logan's claws slashed across his vision and he moved on to a man in the hall, held him still as he was raising his gun to get Logan in his sights. _Stop._

Fifty-one, when he was done. Fifty-one men, most of whom were innocent, but all of whom would have killed Logan, Hank, Alex, Sean… or Raven… or Erik… given the chance and the order, and he could taste it in their minds, foul and bitter and cold: someone had already given the order.

_Emma._

Emma was nowhere to be found. 

He reached as far as he could, searching for any sign of either her or John, until he simply couldn't stretch any further. He felt turned inside out, and it was better to be out than in, much preferable by far. Coming back to himself was like waking up from anesthesia; the scattered pieces of himself fell back into place, adding to the deadweight, and brought back with them all the memories of what he'd done, unbuffered by the madness in which he'd done it. The feeling of nausea compounded with each step, bile welling up the edges of his perception, a sickly yellowish-green. Fifty-one in all, and when he took up the final piece, he cracked his eyes open to see Erik before him, felt Erik's long, cool fingers resting against his throat, where the knife's edge had been not so long ago -- and heard Erik intoning his name over and over, until it became a question he could finally answer.

"Yes." he said, "I'm--." He forgot the next part, tried to start over. "I'll heal--. I'm healing. It's not--. You're." He bit his lip, could only feel the teeth on one side; he bit harder and tasted blood. "I can't. I couldn't." Words didn't make sense. "We--"

Erik rested his forehead against Charles', his hand on Charles' right cheek, the other resting carefully on his shoulder. 

_Here,_ Charles felt Erik's voice reverberate in his mind, finally: _I'm here,_ he thought, and everything else followed. Cuba, watching Erik through Shaw's eyes, the sick feeling of failure and loss as he lay on the beach, the operations, the doctor's unintentionally cruel words, Moira, the boys, his hopes for the school, his hopes for his own recovery, however far-off and however slim the chances, wondering and worrying over Raven, and always, _always_ reaching out for Erik, missing Erik, the gap in his life a mile wide and a lifetime deep. Erik, hidden away behind that helmet, when of all the minds in the world his was the one Charles found most natural to touch, to hold, to be immersed in. And from Erik, the confusion and frustration, wondering what he'd done wrong, thinking it didn't matter, finding that it did; thinking on his feet every moment of every day, in over his head but making it just enough to keep going, and then Raven wearing Charles' form one day, the things Emma said, the sly taunts, Raven returning from the mansion shaking with fury and incoherent, screaming at all of them but especially him, and how he then had to rescue Emma from her, that memory now colored with regret in hindsight; watching Charles being kidnapped, nearly escape, nearly _die_ , and knowing it was his own damn fault that Charles was being hunted so thoroughly, and he'd handed Emma Frost the means by which to destroy them both just because he didn't think, because hadn't thought someone who was willing to work for Schmidt would abhor working for him, because he just wanted to have Charles walking by his side again.

It hurt to move, but Charles moved to close the gap regardless. When he pressed his lips to Erik's, the warm glow that was Erik in the back of his mind shined at the touch, even as Erik backed away. He tried to reach up with his left arm to keep Erik still, but it refused to give -- and when he looked down to see what the matter was, he was surprised to find he was still bound to the wooden chair.

"Wait." Erik plucked the ceramic blade off the floor and cut the ropes, his lips tight in concentration. He was striving to keep his expression bland as he grimly sliced through the cords with care, trying to avoid putting too much pressure on Charles' broken arm, but inside he was a mess of roiling emotions that spiked whenever the blade got caught up.

"It's quite alright, Erik." Charles huffed quietly. "I don't feel it. I'm a mutant, you see. I can bend my own mind so I don't feel how much it…" his words trailed off as he took in how Erik was staring at him, those pale eyes betraying a warmth he'd so desperately missed these many months.

"It's not just that I don't want to hurt you, Charles," Erik said, placing the knife on the floor and resting his hands on either side of Charles’ legs, one side warmer than the other. "I don't want to make it worse." He tilted his head from side to side, considering.

"Left side," Charles chose for him. He tugged his broken arm towards his chest, and tucked the sensation of pain into a small box that he put away in the back of his mind. Erik slipped his left arm over his shoulder and lifted him up. 

An image of Frankenstein's creature lifting the dead man flitted through Erik's mind, unbidden. "I never thought you were a monster," Charles said quietly. "Erik, you're not a monster." The fingers of his left hand gripped Erik's shirt tightly, his limp right arm cradled protectively across his own chest. He rested his head against Erik's shoulder, let himself collapse into Erik's protective hold. "I am," he whispered.

Erik paused after stepping over a nameless body in olive drab uniform, halfway through the room, halfway across the corpses, and bent his head to rest his lips against Charles' hair. "Does choosing to save my life make you a monster, Charles?" he asked as gently as he could, but of course there was steel underlying his words. "Or Raven's life?" He went back to picking his way carefully across the floor.

Charles leaned his head back to peer up at Erik, the pain washing through him in angry throbs with every step that Erik took. "But there was never a choice," he said, confused.

Erik stopped again, and just looked at Charles for a heartbeat, two, three… and then said, " _That's_ why you're not a monster, Charles." He sighed, a familiar half-smile forming even though his brows were still creased in concern, and started walking again.

* * * *

Watching the grave being dug had been the hardest part of it for Charles, because it was one of the most obvious tasks he couldn't help with, and he was the most responsible for it. He had failed John Turner spectacularly, had made faulty assumptions because he was blinded by his own grief and need, and John had paid the price. There had been a chance early on, when Emma Frost had first sent the boy to bring the two of them to his dreamworld; Charles had seen it better from Erik's memories of conversations with her, and now he could only feel guilty and ashamed that he hadn't even thought to look.

Logan had gotten there too late, after Emma had pulled the plug and then gone and "rescued" Stryker. He had looked at John's corpse and felt futile and hopeless; now he looked at Charles and imagined him lying like that in a hospital bed, and the idea of it made him feel powerless and hopeless as well, but also angry at Charles for begin so willing to put himself in situations that would likely end up with him dead. Regardless of the promise he made to protect the professor, regardless of the threat of a very terrifying avenging sister should he fail, he would be inclined to leave the professor tied up at home the next time some agency came calling. Distressingly, Logan didn't care to keep any of these thoughts beneath the surface; it was nearly impossible for Charles to ignore them.

" _You_ ," Logan said, pointing the cigar in his direction, "should reign your boyfriend in." Because of course he had gone charging headlong into danger because he thought he could somehow protect Erik.

Charles pursed his lips, recalling a particular don at Oxford who'd said something in much the same vein to him, once. The old man had been wrong, too. "Perhaps he doesn't need to be reigned in, Logan," he answered. The thoughts behind him -- Alex, Sean -- skipped over Logan's wording and Charles' tacit acknowledgement, and went straight to their own concerns. Charles consciously let go, practicing limiting himself to _only_ the thoughts at the surface, the sort available to be read by anyone sensitive to body language and other subtle social cues. It helped that Logan was actively pushing his thoughts at him, too loud for him to eavesdrop, unintentionally or not. 

"We may not have the same tactics," Charles continued, "we may not always have the same goals, but we're trying to solve the same set of problems."

"We didn't solve this last one very well." Logan tapped down the corner of the newly-laid sod with the toe of his boot. Mr. Tydahl had finished the job with Sean's help, after they'd all said everything they could think of to say. The grave and its small headstone were placed next to the monument they'd erected for Darwin, before Cuba. Charles at least had helped with that one; but both young men had family out there, unaware of the fates they'd met, and neither could be returned to them. Darwin, because he hadn't even left a body behind, and John, because doing so would raise too many questions whose answers would point back to them. Charles had made sure that the coffin would be easy to exhume, because he would, one day, return John to his family.

"No, we didn't," Charles agreed. "But we weren't working together, and from now on -- even when we do work on something on our own -- we'll be _talking_ about it at least." He looked back at the mansion, at the window to Hank's lab where Erik was pointing at the hill to the east and Hank was gesturing at the slope to the south, and Charles smiled because the warm spot in the back of his mind that was Erik was radiating mostly enjoyment to be working on Hank's new Cerebro project, and only a little annoyance to be working _with_ Hank on the project.

_We're going to be at each other's throats in a moment if you don't come up here and weigh in on this, Charles. _Erik's voice was deadpan, but it couldn't hide the warmth accompanying the thought that trailed alongside. _I want you up here with me, not down there catching a chill. _____

Charles smiled, and if still felt a little weird -- the swelling had started to go down, but the left side of his face was still tender -- he didn't mind, because he _did_ have something to smile about. 

Behind him, Sean nudged Alex and nodded up at the window with a grin. Alex shook his head and shoved Sean aside. "We'll never get them to shut up now," he muttered. "Let's go find something new to melt."

* * * *

Epilogue.  
July 1963.

The sound of Charles' wheels rolling easily across the newly-cemented walk was accompanied -- happily -- by Erik's quiet footfalls, nearly drowned out by the material of his pant legs swishing with each long stride. He would be leaving soon; his whole body hummed with it, a greyhound tightly sprung, waiting for the gate to open. 

At the fountain, Charles wheeled a tight turn, spinning to face his companion. He could have waited for Erik to speak aloud, but they were past that, now. " _Look_ at me. I can't _be_ at your side, Erik, not now," he answered. "But you could be at mine, here."

Erik shook his head from side to side; of course he did. "There's a war coming, Charles, don't deny it."

"I don't. But it could be a war of _words_ , and I intend to win that one."

"And if it's not that sort of war? Mutants are being killed in alleys, experimented on in labs." _Tortured,_ Erik wanted to say aloud, but couldn't, and fast on its heels the thoughts, _I never wanted to share that with you_ at the same time as _We both know what it's like._ "I know where that leads, and I will not let that happen." 

The metal of his chair tingled all along his arms, his back, and -- Charles smiled, and he knew his smile was out of place, but he couldn't hide it -- on the backs of this legs, to his knees. Every day held something new, no matter how small, and most of it was good.

He took a deep breath to master the sense of hope bubbling up, to be back in the moment for Erik. "I would not wish your past on anyone, least of all you." Charles reached out his hand to take Erik's, a simple human contact, so small but so important. "But it makes you a fearsome champion. Which we need, it's just… violent tactics can turn so easily against our cause."

"But violence is what humans understand best. Overwhelming force, swiftly applied..." It was an old argument, but they were becoming experienced at it; Erik taking the more objective view, having been at its mercy, and Charles the decidedly subjective view.

"…when the threat is immediate and deadly." Charles finished for him. "The difference between offense and self-defense is key." 

"And so often overlooked by those on the receiving end, so -- in the end -- what does it matter? Acting only at the last moment makes you more vulnerable." 

"History matters; doing the right thing, even with the associated costs, is always borne out in the end."

Erik shook his head. _You're being naive again_ , he thought, and didn't bother trying to think quietly. "The ones who write the history make that call. I'd rather be around when that history is written."

"And you see?" Charles said brightly, reaching out and taking Erik's other hand, trying to keep his tone light, but failing. "We agree. I want you around, too. That's going to be unlikely if you keep making yourself the one threat they spend all their resources on. One country, by itself, driven by pride alone made it to the moon in a few short years; what if they work together out of fear and hatred to stop the one person who threatens them so very much?"

"The worst, the Strykers, they must be dealt with quickly before they can gather strength. Clear out the rats, before their plague can spread."

"You're too well-known now, Erik. If you treat them like vermin, they'll assume all of us will do that."

"And how would you advise me?"

Charles licked his lower lip -- he knew what that did to Erik, but he couldn't help it, really, he was thinking -- and said, "Just make sure to think of them as people. It will help you be fair, even when they're not." 

Erik kneeled in front of him, easily and gracefully, and placed his hands on Charles' chair. He smiled, just a little, just enough. "And my advice for you -- keep thinking of them as _them_. It will help you stay safe, even when things aren't."

Charles smiled ruefully at Erik, who was still trying to protect him; but it quickly turned into a fond smile for the same reason. "Contra mundum, Erik?" he asked quietly.

"Contra mundum, Charles."

* * * *

Raven left two days after Erik, with plans to meet in Geneva or Vienna, or possibly Paris. On her way out the door, she made sure to shoulder her way past Hank, letting her hair shift to a familiar sandy blonde when he looked down at her, startled. She turned deep brown eyes on him with a sly smile.

"Woof," she said, and kept walking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to my beta-readers, without whom I could not post this final chapter! 
> 
> _"Contra mundum" _is from__ Brideshead Revisted; although its appearance in The Bright and Darkened Lands is truer to the source in terms of the names of the speakers, here it is closer to the intent.


End file.
